Why Extramarital Sex Can Kill; July 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Rebecca Coffey; 1 Page(s)

Physicians have known for a long time that, for most men, sex is safe and even life-prolonging. Yet evidence is growing that, at least for adulterers, the picture is different. In a review of the literature on infidelity published online in April in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers presented intriguing evidence that extramarital sex can kill.

To be sure, death by copulation is rare. But the data suggest that when it happens, it usually happens to adulterers, and the cause is typically cardiovascular. In 1963 a Japanese pathologist reported that of 34 men who had died during intercourse, nearly 80 percent had died during extramarital sex, most of cardiac causes. In 2006 South Korean pathologists documented 14 cases of sudden coital death and found that only one had involved a man who had been having intercourse with a woman known to be his wife; all the other men had died of cardiovascular causes. In 2006 researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany published an analysis of sex-related autopsy reports for 68 men. Ten had died with a mistress and 39 with a prostitute.