Heart patients may be nervous or anxious about having sex, but most of them can do so safely — and they shouldn’t be afraid to bring up the topic with their doctor. So says the American Heart Association in its first scientific statement on sexual activity and cardiovascular disease, published online by Circulation. “It’s reasonably safe for most people with stable disease to engage in sexual activity,” says Glenn Levine, a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and lead author of the statement. The risk of suffering a heart event during sex is “minuscule” because sex usually simply doesn’t last very long, according to the statement. (Certainly it typically doesn’t last as long as a marathon, where the risk of cardiac arrest was recently pegged as very small .) Sex is the cause of less than 1% of all acute heart attacks, the review said. And autopsy studies suggest that only between 0.6% and 1.7% of sudden deaths are related to sexual activity. (A word to the wise for cheaters, though: Of those who did die during the act, most were men having “extramarital sexual activity, in most cases with a younger partner in an unfamiliar setting

and/or after excessive food and alcohol consumption.”) The problem is that the issues surrounding sexual activity are “frequently if predominantly not discussed by doctors, nurses and patients,” says Levine. Patients don’t get adequate guidance, and so they or their partners are often more nervous about resuming sex than they should be. Doctors and nurses “should at least broach the topic with patients and give them some ballpark guidance,” not just on sex, but on physical activity in general, says Levine. The statement gives general guidance on whether patients with certain conditions can have sex, and how long they must wait to resume sex after certain heart events and procedures. Some patients — those with symptoms even with minimal activity, for example  — will  be advised to hold off until their symptoms are stabilized with treatment. The statement also covers issues such as the safety of erectile-dysfunction drugs in heart patients and topical or vaginal estrogen therapy for post-menopausal women with heart disease. More research is needed on the effects of sexual activity in females and in older adults with heart problems, Levine says. Image: iStockphoto

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Sex is Safe for Most Heart Patients: AHA