Some men may delay trip to ER until postgame

An axiom of emergency medicine has been proven true: Many men wait until the end of a major televised sporting event before showing up in the emergency room to seek medical treatment.

So says David A. Jerrard, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, in a study presented this month at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in New Orleans.

Jerrard said that a previous study he conducted found that visits by men to the emergency room dropped precipitously during the broadcast of various games, including professional football, but that it wasn’t clear whether there was a corresponding spike after the game was over.

To test his theory that volume would rebound after the game, Jerrard recorded visits to the emergency room at the Baltimore VA Medical Center over a four-hour period beginning 30 minutes after the end of 796 televised baseball, football and basketball games played over a three-year period.

He compared those statistics to similar times and days of the week in which there were no televised games.

The results: On nongame days, Jerrard recorded an average of 9.2 patients per hour in the ER. That compared with 13.2 patients per hour during that four-hour time block on game days.

The problems for which men sought treatment varied, he said. Some were minor, such as indigestion caused by overeating, while others were potentially life-threatening, such as chest pain, which can signal a heart attack.

Jerrard said he did not ask the men why they hadn’t come in sooner: “We figured they might be embarrassed and wouldn’t tell the truth anyway,” he said in an interview.

He now has embarked on a new game-related study: whether the delay in treatment had any impact on the illnesses for which male patients were treated.