Their study was conducted in a place teeming with potential research subjects. Relating his experience as part of the research team, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at University Hospital Munich in Germany, Dr. Moritz Sinner, said, “Basically we were sitting over a beer or two, ironically, and talking about how to design a study about relevance of alcohol consumption on heart rate. “Arrhythmia” means your heartbeat is irregular and this can be deadly.
It doesn’t necessarily mean the heart is beating too fast or too slow. It just means it’s out of its normal rhythm. It may feel like the heart skipped a beat, added a beat, is “fluttering,” or is beating too fast (which doctors call tachycardia) or too slow (called bradycardia). Similarly, an affected person might not notice anything, since some arrhythmias are “silent.” However, arrhythmias can be an emergency, or they may be harmless.
Sinner and his colleagues realised they could do their study at Munich’s Oktoberfest, the annual beer festival that attracts huge crowds of people who are enthusiastic about drinking.
The researchers found what they describe in the study as “a profound association of acute alcohol consumption with sinus tachycardia,” which Sinner describes as “increased heart rate with no justification.”
They also found that, while the heart rate generally varies as a person’s breathing rate changes, that ability decreased as people drank more.
In fact, the more alcohol people had consumed, the more likely they were to experience both symptoms, the data showed. Sinner said these same symptoms were often experienced by people who have had a heart attack in the past, or who have congestive heart failure, although there is no evidence that the participants in this study had any lasting heart damage from their visits to Oktoberfest.
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