Are heart-stopping hockey games, really heart-stopping?

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:01]A lot has been said about the stress of watching playoff hockey.

[00:00:05]Those really tight games, nerve-racking, even heart-stopping, they say. But is the stress of playoff hockey really bad for our hearts? Well, Dr. Christopher Labos is a cardiologist. Hi, Chris.

[00:00:19]Hi, Mitzi.

[00:00:21]So, Chris, there really is though something called the broken heart syndrome.

[00:00:26]Yeah, there really is. This is a real medical condition. It's formally known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy. And what basically happens is that during periods of intense stress, whether physical or emotional, the heart can suddenly dilate and you can have a sudden episode of heart failure where the heart just stops working properly.

[00:00:44]Um it's also sometimes referred to as takotsubo cardiomyopathy because it was first described in Japan and it was named after the octopus traps that Japanese fishermen would use because that's what the heart looks like on an X-ray with a very narrow neck and a very sort of dilated base. So, um you know, it prognosis is usually good. It does people do tend to recover, but you can have some very severe heart failure triggered by just these intense periods of stress.

[00:01:10]But, Chris, what are we really talking about though when we're talking about watching playoff hockey?

[00:01:15]It's stress, right?

[00:01:18]Well, so you've hit the nail on the head. I mean, stress is a very, very subjective thing. Some people go to a hockey game and they enjoy it and they enjoy the action and they have a good time. And other people are screaming and yelling at or yelling at their TV and they have negative consequences. It's very hard to measure stress. It's very hard to measure how it's going to affect people because everybody's different.

[00:01:41]And it's that inherent subjectivity that makes it a very, very difficult thing to study because unlike blood pressure, you can't come up with an actual number. You are relying you are relying on people to self-report their levels of stress, which inherently leads to a fair degree of inaccuracy in the measurement.

[00:01:59]And studies have tried to study different kinds of stress. So, what did they find?

[00:02:04]Well, probably the best study on this is data from the INTERHEART study, which is a very large study which was done across 52 countries. And what they found was when you ask people to report the stress and they had that they had in their lives, you do find that people who have suffered heart attacks compared to a control group do report higher levels of stress.

[00:02:22]And so that sounds like it would be a very sort of important finding, but when you dig down into the numbers, the differences are actually kind of small.

[00:02:30]So, when you look at the differences in terms of financial stress, people who have heart attacks usually report a 2% increase in financial stress. With work, home, and stressful life events, you're talking about 5 to 3% increases. So, it sounds impressive when you read the headlines, but then you drill down into the numbers and you realize the stress levels are actually fairly small between the heart patients and the patients who are otherwise healthy.

[00:02:55]And even though stress is difficult to measure, as you say, there's no denying that getting excited or stressed out does have a physical effect on us.

[00:03:05]Oh, it absolutely does, right? The minute you get worked up over anything, whether it's a hockey game or not, your heart rate's going to go up, your blood pressure is going to go up, you're going to have a surge in your stress hormones, namely cortisol. All of that is biologically measurable.

[00:03:20]The question though is this does this translate into a heart attack? Does this translate into a stroke? Does this translate into some verifiable medical condition? Because what you don't want to do is you don't want to rely on surrogate endpoints because it doesn't quote-unquote matter if your blood pressure goes up, it only matters if that translates into a heart attack and a stroke, and that's a much more difficult association to tie together.

[00:03:44]So, should we be more concerned about the usual risk factors that we always talk about than getting actually stressed out watching the actual playoff game?

[00:03:53]Uh yes. Uh you can be the most laid-back diabetic patient in the world, you still need to take your medication. If you give me a magic wand, I would much rather get rid of smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol rather than stress because while it does matter, it is a relatively minor risk factor compared to all the other stuff, which are major and massive public health problems that we would be far better served as a society if we took care of. Stress matters, smoking matters a lot more.

[00:04:25]Okay.

[00:04:26]Always interesting. Thank you very much for this, Chris.

[00:04:29]Thanks, Miss. Take care.