A new study claims that air pollution is a major cause of heart attacks, even more so than cocaine.
Conducted at Hasselt University in Belgium, the study looked at a variety of different triggers for heart attacks and placed air pollution as the fifth most prominent, behind things like smoking and alcohol, but higher than sex, anger, and even the use of cocaine. Traffic was the number one cause of heart attacks.
“Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are exposed to (it),” the study explained.
What this means is that while taking cocaine is more likely to cause a heart attack than breathing in smoggy air, air pollution is still more dangerous because a much more significant percentage of the population is exposed to it. It’s not as dangerous on an individual level, but it causes more heart attacks because of its wide reach.
This makes cleaning up the air not just an environmental issue, but a health issue as well.
“Physicians are always looking at individual patients — and low risk factors might not look important at an individual level,” researched Tim Nawrot told Reuters, “but if they are prevalent in the population then they have a greater public health relevance,”
