Snow Shoveling Can Be A Health Hazard

If you’re no longer young, but pride prompts you to dig yourself out of the heaviest snowfalls, give a thought to what might be going on inside your blood vessels.

A New Jersey cardiologist who studied 19 people stricken with heart trouble while shoveling out from last winter’s unexpected blizzard in that state says a majority of them had ruptured blood vessel plaques. That means deposits of fat and fibrous matter had built up inside their coronary arteries to the point of being “ripe” for rupturing under the stress of suddenly raised blood pressure - which happens when a sedentary person takes up a strenuous task.

Until now, said Dr. Jacob I. Haft, chief of cardiology at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, there have been few studies of the insides of the blood vessels of patients who had heart trouble while shoveling snow. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Haft said that 16 of the patients underwent dye injections and X-rays of their coronary arteries. Of these, 13 had evidence of coronary plaque rupture, which he said spills fatty and fibrous material into the bloodstream, where it can cause a clot that clogs the artery.

Unlike other kinds of heart attacks, which occur following worsening angina pectoris as a vessel becomes progressively narrowed, the rupture of a plaque is often a sudden event with no warning. “That’s why you have someone who runs up three flights of stairs one day” and is felled by a heart attack - say, while clearing the sidewalk - the next.

“The message is,” Haft said in a telephone interview, “that especially in the ages 50 to 70 you should be very careful about shoveling snow.”