Strawberries And Champagne Good For Reducing Risk Of Sudden Cardiac Arrest

Well, okay, that’s underselling it. The study actually identified some 56 non-clinical risk factors – that is, things like your social, environmental, or financial situations, your behavior, and so on, rather than specifically medical or biological issues – associated with sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). One such factor was indeed champagne and white wine intake, but so too were more expected things like eating fruit, maintaining low blood pressure, and weight management.

It’s a conclusion with the weight of half a million study participants behind it – a truly mammoth sample size, made possible thanks to the UK Biobank. That sets it apart from previous research: “All previous studies investigating the risk factors of SCA were hypothesis-driven,” explained Huihuan Luo, chief investigator and lead author of the study, in a statement this week, “and focused on a limited number of candidate exposure factors grounded in prior knowledge or theoretical frameworks.”

In contrast, Luo explained, “We conducted an exposome-wide association study, which examines the relationship between a wide range of environmental exposures and health outcomes using UK Biobank data, followed by Mendelian randomization to assess causal relationships.” 

The result is a wide range of factors influencing a person’s risk of SCA – many of which stood out as being, well, pretty surprising. There’s the aforementioned “strawberries and champagne” prophylactic, for example – but if you’re too introverted to take advantage, don’t worry: the same correlation was found for sitting in front of a computer screen (more on that later). 

In fact, one of the only things that really stood out as being bad for your cardiac health is feeling chronically sleepy and grumpy, which basically makes this study one of the worst pieces of news for new parents in recent memory.

But at least equally as important as the risk factors themselves was just how impactful they were. “We were surprised by the large proportion of SCA cases […] that could be prevented by improving unfavorable profiles,” said Renjie Chen, a researcher in the School of Public Health at Fudan University, Shanghai, and co-investigator on the paper. 

Indeed, eliminating just the worst one-third of all risk factors could close to halve the SCA incidence, the study found, while attending to the worst two-thirds could cut your risk by, well, about two-thirds. The biggest of those changes came from lifestyle factors, which is itself another piece of good news: “disease prevention through lifestyle modification represents a low-cost, easily implemented, highly feasible and high-yield approach,” the paper points out, with the main impediment to its success being “poor compliance of individuals.”

Of course, there is a catch. Actually, there’s quite a few: first off, the authors are straightforward about the fact that they’ve not included every single risk factor out there – such a task would, to be fair, be difficult to the point of impossibility. Plus, the only measure they could record was “did this person have a sudden cardiac arrest?”, which is a wider question than you might expect. Different types of SCA may be linked to different risk factors – the study simply can’t distinguish well enough to figure that out.

But the biggest caveat, as always, is the most famous: correlation is not causation. Just because the study revealed a link between these risk factors, doesn’t mean one causes the other – and in fact, there’s pretty good reason to suspect other things are at play. Take that tidbit about computer time, for example: “While our initial analysis showed [a negative] correlation, we strongly suspect this reflects underlying socioeconomic or occupational differences between groups,” Luo said, “not a direct protective effect from screen time.”

“This is a common challenge in observational studies,” Luo pointed out – but “more rigorous analyses didn’t show the same protective link, which strengthens our confidence in identifying the other, more clearly modifiable factors as the key targets for prevention.”

Still, the point stands: to reduce your risk of sudden cardiac arrest, it’s not a bad idea to address some of your risk factors – because there’s more you can influence than you might realize. And hey, if you want to enjoy some champers while you do it, well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing after all. 

The study is published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.