Can soccer be bad for your health? Generally, the answer is no if a player maintains their health and fitness, stays in shape, and prepares before exertion. Millions of people have played soccer perfectly fine without health ramifications or heart problems. However, that said, the topic was studied, and some interesting results were found under scientific research.
The 2022 Research
A study was completed and published by one Juan Puche that ended up being included in peer-reviewed reports listed by PubMed Central. The research involved looked at the combination of stress, acute coronary syndrome, and sport event outcome effects on spectators. So, right up front, the research doesn’t have a direct tie between the sports event and a person’s heart health as a sports player, but there is an impact on the audience, it turns out.
Studying soccer game events associated with the Spanish League level play, the study looked at audience members and the frequency of heart attacks or heart problems that occurred in the same event. Obviously, the goal was to see if there was a relationship between the two, but it needed to be more specific. That involved creating and applying metrics about what happened at the given game event and how the audience responded.
The data used historical research covering the two-year period before COVID set in and forced separation requirements on the general population, basically spanning from 2018 to 2020. The information was split into two specific groups. Group one was associated with those having a heart condition at a home game. Group two was associated with people and heart conditions on days there was no match. What was found in the results produced interesting observations. First, heart condition responses went down by 30 percent when the local team won an away game, i.e. not in town. Alternatively, things went in the opposite direction, up 30 percent, when the local team lost a local game.
The profile of those who became patients was not a big surprise; the average patient admitted was over age 65, had a weight problem to the level of obesity, was a past and/or current smoker, suffered from a variety of chronic health conditions like diabetes, was male, and basically was prone to very violent aggressive behavior as well as high anxiety. In short, the most frequent patient was a large, highly-stressed out, poor-exercising spectator who didn’t like local losses at all.
Conclusions
So, what can be gleaned from this study aside from, it’s not a good idea to attend a local soccer game if you don’t like the home team losing? First off, Dr. Ian Weisberg notes being stressed out is never good for the heart. Health stress from exercise, even playing soccer itself, can be very good if the heart also gets a chance to recover and build up resilience. But if the heart is already struggling with obesity, poor health, chronic problems and additional harm via smoking, it’s not going to do well when extreme stress is applied. Secondly, age seems to be a big factor; an aging heart is even more prone to failure when a combination of negative factors are applied to it, particularly in men who go to sporting events and get worked up, it seems.
Common sense would say to avoid being overweight, stop smoking, and stop being stressed out. That leap of logic doesn’t necessarily apply to watching soccer games and the home team in a local match, but if it’s going to stress a person out, then maybe watching on TV instead might be a better idea.
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