Hay Fever Sufferers May Have a Lower Risk for Heart Attack

Patients with allergic rhinitis—commonly known as hay fever—may have a lower risk for heart attacks and cerebrovascular disease, according to new research presented Monday afternoon at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in San Diego.

“Our study findings show that patients with allergic rhinitis have decreased risk of cardiovascular events, cerebrovascular events, and all-cause mortality, which is very different compared to patients with asthma who have increased risk of cardiovascular events,” said presenter and first author Angelina Crans Yoon, MD, of Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center. “That difference in events may be due to changes in the immune system that are known to occur with allergies.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To discover more about the relationship between cardiovascular disease and allergic rhinitis, Crans Yoon and her colleagues studied a group of 109,229 allergic rhinitis patients and 92,775 asthma patients from a large database in the Southern California region. They matched each patient by sex, age, and ethnicity to a control patient who did not have either of these conditions.

They then compared the incidence of cardiovascular events, cerebrovascular events—which affect blood flow to the brain—and all-cause mortality between the start of January 1995 and the end of December 2012.

They found that patients with allergic rhinitis had significantly lower risk for heart attacks, cerebrovascular disease, and all-cause mortality. However, their risk of all cardiovascular events was equivalent to the control group.

While patients with asthma did not have a significantly increased risk of cerebrovascular disease or all-cause mortality, they showed a substantially higher risk of all cardiovascular disease.

“I believe that as it is becoming more well-established that there is a link between the two diseases, physicians should be aware of this and provide more intensive lifestyle counseling to their patients if they are overweight or have other known risk factors, such as high blood pressure,” Crans Yoon said. “They should be doing that with all patients with cardiovascular risk factors without asthma as well. Perhaps it is just that much more important for patients with asthma.”

The researchers did not identify why the risk for heart attack may be lower in patients with allergic rhinitis because it was beyond the scope of their study. However, they did control for age, sex, race, and adjust their hazard-ratio model for common factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, and smoking.

“We are currently looking into the correlation of outcomes with medication use and allergy test results to further explore the relationship between allergies and cardiovascular disease,” Crans Yoon said.

—Colleen Mullarkey

Reference

Crans Yoon AM. Allergic rhinitis, asthma and cardiovascular disease. American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Meeting 2014.