(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-12-04 11:12

_Too much salt has an even more immediate effect, causing fluid retention that in turn makes the heart have to pump harder.

_Alcohol in moderation is considered heart-healthy. But if a round of holiday parties leaves you tipsy, that, too, makes your heart pump harder to get blood to peripheral arteries.

_Worse is something called "holiday heart syndrome," where alcohol literally irritates the heart muscle to trigger an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation. If a-fib goes unchecked for too long, it in turn can cause a stroke.

_People say they're too busy to exercise, especially as it gets cold and darkness falls earlier. It can take months to build back up to pre-holiday exercise habits.

As for cold weather, it can constrict blood vessels, and the extra exertion of snow shoveling can cause a heart attack. The usual winter rise in respiratory diseases is another risk, adding further burden to a stressed heart -- another reason to get a flu shot.

But the holiday spike happens even in warm climates.

And delay in treatment plays a role.

Hospitals may be short-staffed during the holidays, slowing the time it takes to diagnose a heart attack and start clearing the blocked artery, says Dr. Alice Jacobs of Boston University, past president of the American Heart Association.

The good news: The nation's hospitals are undergoing a major shift to speed care to heart attack sufferers. It's called "door to balloon time," and the aim is to reopen blocked arteries with angioplasties or other procedures within 90 minutes of arrival.

Only about a third of people suffering major heart attacks get such fast care now. But more than 900 hospitals have signed on to meet that challenge — sites that either are forming 24-hour cardiac catheterization teams like Suddath's, or making sure on-call doctors arrive within minutes, or ferrying patients to those angioplasty centers.

But for the hospital overhaul to work, patients can't hesitate when symptoms strike.

"If you have symptoms, don't ignore them, wherever you are," Jacobs stresses.

Yet realizing you're having a heart attack can be hard. Terry Bieber was just 50 when she woke up two days after Thanksgiving 2006 feeling what she thought was indigestion, got some Tums and returned to bed. Sometime later her husband realized she was sweating heavily while her skin was cold to the touch. Still, she argued when he went to call 911.

Like many women, Bieber didn't feel classic chest pain or pain radiating down her arm. She had to be helicoptered from the hospital near her Prince Frederick, Md., home to Washington Hospital Center for emergency angioplasty of two arteries.

"Don't take any chances," she now advises. "I had no clue at all that's what it was. ... If I had been by myself, I probably would not have called 911."

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