Each approaching blizzard brings warnings about the dangers
of shoveling snow, an activity that sends thousands of Americans to emergency
rooms each winter. Don't tackle the walkway if you aren't in good enough shape,
say the experts. You can get hurt or, even worse, trigger a heart attack or
stroke.
Medically speaking, a person is indeed more likely to keel
over while heaving snow than, say, jogging on a treadmill. But why?
"Physically, what happens when you get really cold is
you have constriction of the blood vessels," says Lawrence Phillips, a
cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center. "It decreases the blood supply
you're getting to your vital organs."
That's bad news for people with heart problems, diabetes or
high blood pressure. But just as big a problem is that many people dig in
despite not having exercised in weeks or months or years. "If you haven't
been exercising and you haven't been exerting yourself, this is not the time to
start," Phillips said. "The amount of work that goes into shoveling
snow is tremendous. ... People will underestimate the amount of work they are
doing."
At the gym, he noted, it's easy to hop off a treadmill when
you start feeling winded or to slip out of that spin class early. But shoveling
snow tends to be a "goal-oriented" activity. Call it pride,
stubbornness or maybe naivete, but men especially tend to keep at it until the
job is finished -- or, too often, until disaster strikes.
"They are pushing to clear a driveway or a
sidewalk," Phillips said, "and they aren't thinking about how their
bodies are responding to that."
William Suddath, an interventional cardiologist at MedStar
Washington Hospital Center, likens it to "beginning a weightlifting
program in freezing temperatures without any preparation."
Suddath has witnessed the consequences firsthand. During
the epic "Snowmaggedon" that hit the Washington region in 2010, his
hospital saw a wave of emergencies involving people who'd suffered heart
attacks while shoveling the mountains of snow.
"Heart attack rates go up, sudden deaths go up,"
he said, with the weather often preventing paramedics from reaching people as
quickly as they otherwise might. "Some heart attacks likely will not be
reversed as they could have been in another situation. It's a major problem
during a snowstorm when you just can't get to patients."
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