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Can The Weather Affect Your Heart?

SCRANTON — An accomplished heart doctor and a WNEP-TV meteorologist, two longtime friends, had a theory about bad weather and heart attacks and decided to...
hw cardiac 2shot

SCRANTON -- An accomplished heart doctor and a WNEP-TV meteorologist, two longtime friends, had a theory about bad weather and heart attacks and decided to take a hard look at the data.

Geisinger-CMC in Scranton is a busy place and it's about to get even busier when an extensive renovation project is complete.

But apparently it's busiest when the weather is bad.

"My perception was that raining, overcast, colder, snowier days were busier for us in the cardiac cath lab," said Dr. Stephen Voyce, chief of cardiology at Geisinger-CMC.

Dr. Voyce had long suspected a link between weather and cardiac events. If only he knew someone with access to years' worth of weather data.

"Joe and I are from the same hometown, same church parish, since we were kids and we've talked about this for a long period of time," laughed Dr. Voyce.

He admits to being longtime friends with WNEP-TV's Joe Snedeker, who has a confession to make of his own.

"At my house I have compiled weather data since my teenage years."

The two worked with a group of cardiology fellows to examine the correlation of weather patterns with hospitalization for heart attacks, and death rate for heart attacks.

Joe broke it down into variables such as temperature, dew point, humidity, and wind speed, looking for any kind of pattern.

"In a big storm, like a nor'easter, pressure can get quite low. You can't feel it, but it's happening. We have instrumentation that can notice that change and it's quite abrupt."

The two did not find a statistically significant correlation to heart attack deaths in inclement weather. But they did find that there's a greater rate of hospitalization for heart attacks in the fall and winter.

And Dr. Voyce presented those findings to the American College of Cardiology in Dallas.

The study, they admit, was small and hardly exhaustive or conclusive but does bring up some points that can be further investigated with a larger group.

As long as Dr. Voyce is in charge.

"He's a lot better looking and older than me," laughed Joe.

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