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WEDNESDAY, March 21 (HealthDay News) -- Firefighters are much more likely to die from heart disease when they are actually fighting fires, new research finds.
"The fact that firefighters do have a physical risk is not something new," said study author Dr. Stefanos N. Kales, an assistant professor of occupational medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health. "This is the strongest evidence to date that specific firefighting acts can trigger cardiac events."
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Although firefighters are required to be physically fit, heart disease causes 45 percent of deaths that occur when they are duty, concludes a report by Kales and his colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine.
An earlier study suggested that the stress of putting out a fire might play a role in cardiac deaths, Kales said, and that suspicion was confirmed by this latest study. In it, the researchers looked at all the deaths of on-duty firefighters between 1994 and 2004 -- leaving out Sept. 11, 2001, when many deaths were due to the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Data from several sources, including 17 metropolitan fire departments, indicated that 32.1 percent of the cardiac deaths were associated with the acts involved in suppressing a fire, the researchers found. The odds of cardiac death were anywhere from 12 to 136 times higher when compared to nonemergency duty.
The report has lessons for firefighters and their doctors, Kales said. "Physicians should be aggressive in treating firefighters' cardiac risk factors," he said. "When counseling them about return to work, they should exercise extreme caution."
And while physical fitness is part of the job, Kales said, an earlier study by his group found that "a quarter of the firefighters who died of heart disease on duty had a prior diagnosis of cardiovascular disease."
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