foodconsumer.org: Could Eating Chocolate Prevent Heart Attack Death?

Could Eating Chocolate Prevent Heart Attack Death?
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admin on 02/12/2010 12:34:00
 
A new study in the Sept 2009 issue of Journal of internal medicine suggests that
eating chocolate may reduce the risk of dying from acute myocardial infarction
or heart attack.
The study led by Janszky I and colleagues from Karolinska Institute in
Stockholm, Sweden shows that people who ate up to once each week were at a 45
percent reduced risk of dying from hear attack.
The researchers started to follow 1169 non-diabetic patients hospitalized with a
confirmed first acute myocardial infarction between 1992 and 1994 in Stockholm,
Sweden. The patients returned a standardized questionnaire about their chocolate
eating habits for the proceeding 12 months. Hospitalizations and mortality were
recorded with national registries for a period of eight years.
Compared to those who never ate chocolate, men and women who ate less than once
a month and twice or more per week were at a 27 and 56 percent reduced risk of
dying from cardiac mortality respectively.
Other sweets were not associated with reduced risk of premature death.
The study did not consider those who died from the first acute heart attack nor
other types of cardiovascular disease, according to the study report.
A health observer who did not want to be named suggested that the study results
did not give a whole picture of the effect of chocolate on death risk and the
possible benefits may not apply to other groups of heart patients. Also the
study itself did not establish a causal relation between eating chocolate and
reduced mortality.
The researchers acknowledged that "confirmation of this strong inverse
relationship from other observational studies or large-scale, long-term,
controlled randomized trials is needed."
By David Liu