MONDAY, Nov. 11, 2019 (HealthDay News) — Smoking pot doesn’t do your heart or your brain any favors, a pair of new studies shows.

Frequent pot smokers are more than twice as likely to suffer a stroke compared with those who don’t partake, the first study found.

They’re also more likely to be hospitalized for a dangerously erratic heart rhythm, according to the second study.

Both studies are to be presented at an upcoming meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA), in Philadelphia, Nov. 16 to 18. Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The findings are “thought provoking at a time when there is a great push to legalize marijuana, and the herb and its metabolites are being promoted as a cure-all for a myriad of medical conditions and ailments,” said Dr. Ranjit Suri, an electrophysiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York City. Suri was not part of either study.

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WEDNESDAY, Sept. 18, 2019 (HealthDay News) — Video games that guarantee heart-stopping action might come dangerously close to fulfilling that promise in some players.

A handful of video gamers have passed out when intense sessions caused their heartbeat to lapse into an irregular rhythm known as an arrhythmia, researchers report.

Three boys between the ages of 10 and 15 separately lost consciousness when the action in a war video game grew to a fever pitch, the research team noted in a letter published Sept. 19 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Heart rhythm recordings either at the time or subsequently revealed that they had suffered a life-threatening heart rhythm disturbance — a form of ventricular tachycardia, in essence a near cardiac arrest,” said senior researcher Dr. Christian Turner. He is a pediatric cardiologist with the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia.

Each of the boys were found to have rare and very serious underlying heart abnormalities, either due to the structure or the electrical function of their heart muscle, the researchers said.

This was a surprise for two of the boys, as they’d never been diagnosed with a heart problem, Turner said.

These cases show that video games can produce the same sort of adrenaline rush that can cause athletes and people under extreme duress to die when their hearts stop, said Dr. Ranjit Suri, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York City.

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If you heart skips a beat, best be sure it’s because of love and not a heart arrhythmia. But if you’re playing an intense video game, better not get all that worked up to avoid an arrhythmia and a lethal cardiac arrest or heart attack.

A research letter published on Sept. 19 in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed the cases of three young boys between the ages of 10 and 15 that fainted or lost consciousness due to the intense excitement in the violent video games they were playing.

An arrhythmia manifests in an irregular heartbeat that’s either too fast or too slow. A too fast heart rate (above 100 beats per minute in adults) is called tachycardia. A too slow heart rate (below 60 beats per minute) is called bradycardia.

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