Heart patients may be nervous or anxious about having sex, but most of them can do so safely — and they shouldn’t be afraid to bring up the topic with their doctor.

So says the American Heart Association in its first scientific statement on sexual activity and cardiovascular disease, published online by Circulation.

“It’s reasonably safe for most people with stable disease to engage in sexual activity,” says Glenn Levine, a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and lead author of the statement.

The risk of suffering a heart event during sex is “minuscule” because sex usually simply doesn’t last very long, according to the statement. (Certainly it typically doesn’t last as long as a marathon, where the risk of cardiac arrest was recently pegged as very small.)

Sex is the cause of less than 1% of all acute heart attacks, the review said. And autopsy studies suggest that only between 0.6% and 1.7% of sudden deaths are related to sexual activity. More...