Good news: sex is safe for most heart patients.
If you're healthy enough to walk up two flights of stairs without chest pain or gasping for breath, you can have a love life. That advice from a leading doctors' group last week addresses one of the most pressing, least discussed issues facing survivors of heart attacks and other heart patients.
The American Heart Association said having sex only slightly raises the chance of a heart attack. And that's true for people with and without heart disease.
Surprisingly, despite the higher risk for a heart patient to have a second attack, there's no evidence that they have more sex-related heart attacks than people without cardiac disease.
Many heart patients don't think twice about climbing stairs, yet many worry that sex will cause another heart attack, or even sudden death, said Dr Glenn Levine, lead author of a report detailing the recommendations. Levine is professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
The report said sex is something doctors should discuss with all heart patients. Levine said few do because they're uncomfortable talking about it or they information.
The new guidance is designed to fill that gap.
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