That "Monday morning feeling" could be a crushing pain in the chest which leaves you sweating and gasping for breath. Recent research from Germany and Italy shows that heart attacks are more common on Monday mornings and doctors blame the stress of returning to work after the weekend break. The risk of having a heart attack on any given day should be one in seven, but a six-year study helped by researchers at the Free University of Berlin of more than 2,600 Germans showed that the average person had a 20 per cent higher chance of having a heart attack on a Monday than on any other day. Working Germans are particularly not protected against attack, with a 33 per cent higher risk at the beginning of the working week. Non-workers, by comparison, appear to be no more at risk on a Monday than any other day. A study of 11,000 Italians proved 8 am on a Monday morning as the most stressful time for the heart, and both studies showed that Sunday is the least stressful day, with fewer heart attacks in both countries. The findings could lead to a better understanding of what is the immediate cause of heart attacks, according to Dr Stefan Willich of the Free University. "We know a lot about long-term risk factors such as smoking and cholesterol but we don't know what actually causes heart attacks, so we can't give clear advice on how to prevent them," he said. Monday mornings have a double helping of stress for the working body as it makes a rapid change from sleep to activity, and from the relaxing weekend to the pressures of work. "When people get up, their blood pressure and heart rate go up and there are hormonal changes in their bodies," Willich explained. "All these things can have an unfavourable effect in the blood system and increase the risk of a clot in the arteries which will cause a heart attack." "When people return to work after a weekend off, the pace of their life changes. They have a higher workload, more stress, more anger and more physical activity," said Willich. To protect people from suffering from heart attack, doctors have paid much attention to  _  .
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