Flu Infection May Increase Heart Attack Risk, Study Shows

In “Science Now,” the Los Angeles Times reports that research suggests “the first week or so of a flu infection appears to make” people “much more susceptible to a heart attack.” The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Reuters reports that researchers “used confirmed cases of flu, analyzing 364 heart attacks from mid-2008 through mid-2015 among Ontario residents age 35 or older who were registered with the province’s publicly funded health insurance program.” The investigators found that “the heart attack rate was 20.0 admissions per week during the seven days after diagnosis of the flu, versus 3.3 per week during the 52 weeks before and 51 weeks after that seven-day window.” On its website, NBC News reports that the data indicated that people who had the flu “had a six-fold higher risk of suffering a heart attack in the seven days after they