On March 17, 2010, ScienceDaily published a story about an intriguing report investigating the connection between stock-market activity and the frequency of heart attacks. The researchers, a team from Duke University Medical Center, discovered an increased incidence of cardiac arrest in the United States between January 2008 and July 2009, precisely when the stock market showed a clear decline in the midst of a massive economic crisis. Although the scientists determined in subsequent tests that this inverse relationship wasn’t quite as pronounced as they believed initially (due to seasonal fluctuations in heart attack rates), their study remains groundbreaking in terms of its efforts to explore a rarely covered topic: the impact of economic patterns on cardiovascular events.
It may come as no surprise to some that heart attacks go up when the NASDAQ goes down—after all, a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggests that stress is associated with heart disease and early death. But your ticker isn’t the only thing those negative shifts in the ticker tape affect. As it turns out, economic strain manifests itself in all kinds of subtler ways as well.