dieting and heart attacks

[myowncrazybeat]

With all the heart commercials on this month (Healthy Heart Awareness Month), the media have discussed several models that died of heart attacks due to starvation, including 2 sisters in another country.  I thought heart attacks were a result of an interruption of blood flow due to clots, plaque...  In an otherwise healthy person, how would extreme dieting cause a heart attack?  Thanks!

[myowncrazybeat]

Thanks to all of you for your responses!!  I understand much better now.  

[anacyde]

Similarly, I'm no less than amazed to be alive.  When I was diagnosed with SVT at 16, it was on the heels of about 1 solid year of purging everything I ate by any means necessary.  What I actually did eat.  A relapse in college nearly killed me.  It's pretty amazing how much mind control comes with an eating disorder.  I actually didn't think 93 pounds was thin enough.  I did not see it in the mirror.  I saw something else entirely.  And as for playing any sport, by then I was so weak I had trouble mastering the three flights of stairs to the apartment I lived in back then.

I was told in the ER one day in 1999 (yet another electrolyte imbalance, due to arrhythmia) that if I continued on the path I was on, he gave me three to six months - if I was really lucky.  Needless to say, I switched paths.  I liked that doctor, he didn't sugar coat anything.

[fearfactor]

I was anorexic when I was younger - about 13 years old.  I remember one day I was playing tennis and sweating a lot (and starving myself as well) and my heart started beating faster than it ever had before in my life, just out of nowhere.  It stopped, thank God.  I wonder how close I came to killing myself back then.  

[anacyde]

Extreme dieting can cause cardiac arrest, so not a heart attack in the sense of ischemic heart disease.  Extreme dieters typically die of heart failure or an electrolyte imbalance (which leads to a fatal arrhythmia) which leads to cardiac arrest.  It is usually what kills the victims of anorexia and bulimia.

Other dieters may also develop life-threatening arrhythmias using certain diet supplements and pills.