Time for a Heart Attack?

The Most Common Time of Day to Have a Heart Attack according to Doctors is early morning just as we are waking up. This equals the time between 6am and Noon with the first 3 hours of waking the worst. The Heart is ruled by the Sun. This means that the time that one is most likely to have a Heart Attack is when the Sun is Rising over the Ascendant and moving into the 12th House. Pretty interesting considering that 1st House rules the Physical Body and 12th House rules Chronic Illness.

The times, of course, don't often apply that perfectly. Where I was born the Sun would have risen over the Ascendant a couple of hours earlier (maybe due to Daylight Savings time?).

This is also significant because as you can read from the quote below, Dreaming and Functioning of the Circulatory System are key processes that have to do with waking up. These correspond with the Sun moving through the 12th House (Dreaming) and then the 11th House (Circulatory System, opposes 5th House that rules the Heart). At any rate, this means that Heart Attacks are associated with the Sun moving through the Upper Left Hand corner of the Wheel.

Of course, the individual predisposition for Heart Attack is also a tiny little part to factor in.


Article is here:


http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080723/hl_time/whenareyoumostlikelytohaveaheartattack

A group from Harvard estimated this risk and evaluated that on average, the
extra risk of having a myocardial
infarction, or heart attack, between 6 a.m. and noon is about 40%. But if
you calculate only the first three hours after waking, this relative risk is
threefold.

The cardiovascular system follows a daily pattern that is oscillatory in
nature: most cardiovascular functions exhibit circadian changes
(circadian is from the Latin circa and diem, meaning "about
one day"). Now, a heart attack depends on the imbalance between increased
myocardial oxygen demand (i.e., a greater need for oxygen in your heart) and
decreased myocardial oxygen supply - or both. And unfortunately, some functions
in the first hours of the day require more myocardial oxygen support: waking and
commencing physical activities, the peak of the adrenal hormone cortisol [which
boosts blood-pressure and blood-sugar levels] and a further increase in blood
pressure and heart rate due to catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline),
which show a peak when you wake up. All those factors lead to an increase of
oxygen consumption but at the same time contribute to the constriction of
vessels. So you have reduced vessel size and reduced blood flow to the coronary
vessels.

You have to remember that blood coagulation is important in the genesis of
what we call thrombi, the blood clots that can block the blood vessels
and cut off supply to the heart. When we wake up, platelets, the particles in
the blood that make thrombi, are particularly adhesive to the vessels. Usually
we have an endogenous system - it's called fibrinolysis - to dissolve the
thrombi. But in the morning, the activity of our fibrinolytic system is reduced.
So we have a greater tendency to make thrombi that can occlude the coronary
vessels. This contributes to further reduction of coronary blood flow. Thus, at
the same time that you need more blood flow, you have less.

All these changes, however, probably are not so harmful in healthy people.
But for a person with a plaque in the coronary vessel, if these changes occur at
the same time and peak at the same time, the final result is a higher risk of
heart attack during that specific window of morning hours.

Why is the risk also higher during the last part of sleep? Usually, during
the night, the cardiovascular system is "sleeping," which is characterized by
low blood pressure and heart rate. But the last stage of sleep - REM, or rapid
eye movement, sleep [when we believe most dreaming occurs] - is a risk period
for cardiovascular emergencies because when you dream, you have a dramatic
increase of activity of the autonomic nervous system - even more than when you
are awake. Probably each of us can remember waking up in the morning sometimes
feeling very tired. That's because during that stage of dreams, we were running
or facing some danger. Your heart was running, so it was consuming oxygen. And
for similar reasons to those when you're awake, that activity is risky if you
don't have a good vessel system.