(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Can you really laugh yourself to death? [1]

['David Pescovitz']

Date: 2023-03-10

In 1975, Alex Mitchell, 50, was watching the UK television comedy The Goodies when he burst in such hard laughter that, well, he died laughing. His heart had failed. To be fair, he didn't really die of laughter.

"Laughing can increase your intrathoracic pressure, and if you have an aortic aneurysm, that pressure can be transmitted into your vascular system, and it would rupture," Duke University School of Medicine cardiologist Jorge Antonio Gutierrez told Gizmodo in 2019. "But in that case, you just happened to laugh: the laughing didn't get you. Somebody can have a heart attack while they're laughing, but they were going to have a heart attack no matter what."

From Mental Floss:

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2023/03/10/can-you-really-laugh-yourself-to-death.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.