London, August 14: There’s good news for cardiac patients with a sweet tooth.
A new study has found that regular consumption of chocolates by heart attack patients might reduce mortality rates three-fold.
Consumption of chocolate two or more times in a week actually showed a positive association in reducing death rates in heart attack survivors compared to those who never eat them, according to a study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
The research, led by Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is the first to show that consuming chocolate can help increase life expectancy of patients suffering from heart attack.
The scientists in an eight year study of 1,169 non-diabetic men and women, aged between 45-to-70 years, first heart attack survivors assessed the long-term effects of chocolate consumption.
They found that chocolate consumption had a strong inverse association with cardiac mortality. When compared with those never eating chocolate, the multi-variable-adjusted hazard ratios were 0.73 (95 per cent confidence interval, 0.41–1.31), 0.56 (0.32–0.99) and 0.34 (0.17–0.70) for those consuming chocolate less than once per month, up to once per week and twice or more per week respectively.
The study found chocolate consumption was associated with lower cardiac mortality in patients free of diabetes surviving their first heart attack.
–Agencies