EFN

Drinking coffee, making love, getting angry or even blowing your nose can significantly increase your chances of having a deadly type of stroke, scientists have warned.

On “The Early Show,” CBS News Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton said the American Heart Association study is “very reputable. … They looked at about 250 people who had suffered a ruptured aneurysm … surveyed them and followed them for about a three-year time period.”

Just what is an aneurysm? It’s a weakened portion of a blood vessel. Aneurysms can occur in various places throughout the body, but cerebral aneurysms are especially dangerous. If they burst and bleed – an event known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage – they can be deadly.

Eight factors

Calculating population attributable risk — the fraction of hemorrhages that can be attributed to a particular trigger factor — the researchers identified the eight factors and their contribution to the risk as:

* Coffee consumption (10.6 percent)
* Vigorous physical exercise (7.9 percent)
* Nose blowing (5.4 percent)
* Sexual intercourse (4.3 percent)
* Straining to defecate (3.6 percent)
* Cola consumption (3.5 percent)
* Being startled (2.7 percent)
* Being angry (1.3 percent)

“All of the triggers induce a sudden and short increase in blood pressure, which seems a possible common cause for aneurysmal rupture,” said Monique H.M. Vlak, M.D., lead author of the study and a neurologist at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands.