Health

Smog May Cause Heart Attack

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 31, 2002 / 8:40 AM EST / CBS

Air pollution has long been known to cause serious medical problems for people with lung disease. But that may not be the worst of it. CBS correspondent Jerry Bowen reports from Los Angeles.

"Air pollution can trigger heart attackes and death in people already suffering from heart disease," says Dr. Timothy Denton at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Air pollution can actually cuase the heart to act abnormally."

A dozen nationwide studies have found that air pollution can trigger heart attacks and death in people already suffering from heart disease, the number one killer in America, and the cause is a surprise.

It's not just the chemicals," says Denton. "It's particles, it's dust."

The kind of dust and microscopic particles that blow up each spring in California's Coachella Valley where people have always lived to protect their health.

Eighty-year-old Robert McWherter, one of 23 cardiac patients in a study to determine the effects of high dust days, calls the Valley his home. "I think definitely it saved my life."

Monitoring disclosed his heart was beating abnormally. So he got fitted for a life-saving pace maker and defibrilator.

"I felt good about it because I thought I was doing something worthwhile without realizing it was going to be a big help to me," says McWherter.

There's even more particulate pollution in America's major cities. And researchers found that even moderate levels there had an effect. "What we are finding is that this air pollution can affect the electrical system of the heart," says Denton.

It's believed that when particulates reach the lungs of very ill heart patients, the nervous system responds by triggering an irregular, potentially fatal heart beat.

It's estimated the number of heart disease deaths due to air pollution range from a low of 1,000 to as many as 10,000 each year nationally. But researchers say the link is so new that more data is needed to identify the patients at highest risk.