The U.S. Death Rate Spikes On Thanksgiving
USA – Doctors have long known that the overall U.S. mortality rate annually spikes around Thanksgiving, and remains elevated through the winter. (According to the CDC, the nation’s death rate in December 2013 was about 5% higher than the death rate in November 2013.)
But Thanksgiving sticks out as an especially dangerous day, and there are two major culprits: Car accidents and coronary events.Some of that’s because of seasonal effects, like the increasingly chilly weather and the annual spread of the flu.
And both of those are largely preventable.
Dangerous Time To Drive
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is again warning drivers to stay safe on Thanksgiving. And for good reason — no holiday leads to more deadly accidents.
According to the most recent data available from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, there were 764 crashes involving a fatality during Thanksgiving 2012. (About 400 of them involved motorists.) In comparison, there were 654 crashes involving a fatality during Christmas that year.
There were nearly 50,000 non-fatal car accidents that Thanksgiving holiday, too.
In many cases — too many, frankly — simple safety precautions would’ve saved lives. According to NHTSA, at least 40% of passengers killed that Thanksgiving were involved in crashes with drunk drivers, and about 60% of passengers weren’t wearing their safety belts.
In an alert this week, NHTSA reminded drivers to check that their tires were properly inflated and windshield wipers were working, in order to potentially fight through winter storms. That’s especially trenchant advice given the bad weather expected to blanket the East Coast this holiday weekend.
NHTSA also stressed: Don’t rush on the roads to make it to a holiday event. “Plan your travel and route by checking the weather, road conditions, and traffic,” the agency cautioned. “Leave early, if necessary, and allow plenty of time to safely get to your destination.”
And there’s never an excuse to drive drunk.
Dangerous Time For The Heart, Too
Doctors have also chronicled a rise in heart attacks around the winter holidays.
It’s not just weather-related, as Americans shovel snow or suffer poor health in the cold. Looking at death certificates in always-warm Los Angeles County, across the 1980s and 1990s, researchers saw that there were about 33% more deaths related to coronary disease in the winter than in the summer. That spike began, year after year, around Thanksgiving.
The higher risk of heart attacks starting on Thanksgiving “could be related to such behavioral changes around the holiday time as increased food, salt, and alcohol consumption,” author Dr. Robert Kloner and his colleagues mused in an influential 1999 journal article.
“The emotional and psychological stresses of the holidays might also contribute.”
Dr. David Agus told “CBS This Morning” last year that the rush to be with your family on Thanksgiving, and your family’s routine, may exacerbate underlying problems.
“People forget their pills when they travel,” Agus pointed out. “They eat a lot of food which shuns the blood to the stomach and then they try to do too much – playing football in the yard – and it causes problems,” he said. “So for all those reasons, you’ve got to be aware.”
Originally published by Forbes, author Dan Diamond.
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