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<H1>Original Link: http://football.guardian.co.uk/thekn...981351,00.html</H1><H1>Is being a football supporter bad for your health?</H1>James Dart
Wednesday January 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
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"And now I've got a bloody ulcer too!" Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><DIV id=GuardianArticleBody>"I found this medical paper which claims that when a team loses at home the rate of fatal heart attacks and strokes in the area shows a significant rise. Is this for real? And are there any other known proven health-risks involved in being a football supporter?" enquires Mark Ireland.
The medical paper you quote is certainly for real, Mark - and, what's more, research shows that watching football can affect your sight and your insides too.
<SCRIPT language=javascript type=text/javascript> </SCRIPT><DIV class=MPU_display_class id=spacedesc_mpu_div>"A colleague and I published a couple of articles relating to vision and the watching of football matches in an optometrists journal," writes Dr Peter Howarth, from the Visual Ergonomics Research Group at Loughborough University. "In essence, we showed how the viewing of moving black-and-white striped patterns can improve vision, which was a finding consistent with a new treatment for amblyopia (reduced vision) that had been developed at Cambridge a few years earlier. </DIV>
"In addition, we suggested (although we didn't have conclusive proof) that when the ball was consistently kicked into the air, there was a slight reduction in visual performance for spectators (akin to the short-sightedness seen in feature-free environments, and known as 'empty-field myopia' or the short-sightedness seen at night or 'night myopia'). Not-very-good reproductions can be found here and here."
If making you blind wasn't bad enough, football also seems to be bad for your gut, as Paddy MacLachlan explains. "During the 1997-98 season, the director of clinical psychiatry at the University of Florence and the chief gastroenterologist at the city's Careggi Hospital happened to notice a significant rise in people, almost all of them males, coming into hospital with stomach upsets in the days after Fiorentina had lost a match," he recalls. "Many of these upsets were attributed to the Elico bacterium, which produces ulcer-like growths when stimulated by anger and frustration."
But Paddy's got more. "Psychologist Dr Paul Bernhardt conducted an experiment for the University of Utah, in which he collected saliva samples from a group of Italy fans and Brazil fans immediately before and after the 1994 World Cup final. It showed that the Brazilians' testosterone level surged to 20% above normal as a result of the game, while the Italians' dropped below normal by exactly the same amount after they'd lost on penalties. 'I think this confirms a lot of people's notions that serious sports fans real
Wednesday January 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=140 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD><TD>"And now I've got a bloody ulcer too!" Photograph: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><DIV id=GuardianArticleBody>"I found this medical paper which claims that when a team loses at home the rate of fatal heart attacks and strokes in the area shows a significant rise. Is this for real? And are there any other known proven health-risks involved in being a football supporter?" enquires Mark Ireland.
The medical paper you quote is certainly for real, Mark - and, what's more, research shows that watching football can affect your sight and your insides too.
<SCRIPT language=javascript type=text/javascript> </SCRIPT><DIV class=MPU_display_class id=spacedesc_mpu_div>"A colleague and I published a couple of articles relating to vision and the watching of football matches in an optometrists journal," writes Dr Peter Howarth, from the Visual Ergonomics Research Group at Loughborough University. "In essence, we showed how the viewing of moving black-and-white striped patterns can improve vision, which was a finding consistent with a new treatment for amblyopia (reduced vision) that had been developed at Cambridge a few years earlier. </DIV>
"In addition, we suggested (although we didn't have conclusive proof) that when the ball was consistently kicked into the air, there was a slight reduction in visual performance for spectators (akin to the short-sightedness seen in feature-free environments, and known as 'empty-field myopia' or the short-sightedness seen at night or 'night myopia'). Not-very-good reproductions can be found here and here."
If making you blind wasn't bad enough, football also seems to be bad for your gut, as Paddy MacLachlan explains. "During the 1997-98 season, the director of clinical psychiatry at the University of Florence and the chief gastroenterologist at the city's Careggi Hospital happened to notice a significant rise in people, almost all of them males, coming into hospital with stomach upsets in the days after Fiorentina had lost a match," he recalls. "Many of these upsets were attributed to the Elico bacterium, which produces ulcer-like growths when stimulated by anger and frustration."
But Paddy's got more. "Psychologist Dr Paul Bernhardt conducted an experiment for the University of Utah, in which he collected saliva samples from a group of Italy fans and Brazil fans immediately before and after the 1994 World Cup final. It showed that the Brazilians' testosterone level surged to 20% above normal as a result of the game, while the Italians' dropped below normal by exactly the same amount after they'd lost on penalties. 'I think this confirms a lot of people's notions that serious sports fans real
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