Constipation might increase a person’s risk of having a heart attack or stroke, particularly if they also have high blood pressure, a new study warns.

People who are constipated have twice the risk of a major heart health problem compared to those with normal bowel habits, researchers report.

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Specifically, they are 2.7 times more likely to have heart failure, 2.4 times more likely to suffer a stroke and 1.6 times more likely to experience a heart attack or chest pain, results showed.

Identifying this link could help scientists “discover new therapeutic interventions and implement more effective management strategies based on individual risk assessment in line with precision medicine principles,” wrote the research team led by Dr. Tenghao Zheng, a clinical data analyst at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.

For the study, researchers analyzed health data on more than 400,000 people participating in the U.K. Biobank research project. The Biobank contains electronic health records, lifestyle surveys and self-reported health conditions and medication use.

Recent research has found that constipation is associated with high blood pressure and heart disease, researchers said in background notes.

This latest study found a link between constipation and heart health emergencies, particularly among participants with high blood pressure.

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People with constipation and high blood pressure had a 68% increased risk of a major heart health problem, compared to those with high blood pressure alone, results showed.

Researchers also found that constipation shares some genetics with heart problems. Specifically, constipation shares 21% to 27% of genetic variants with heart disease, even though constipation is an inherited trait only about 4% of the time.

The findings, published recently in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology, warrant further research to better understand this connection, researchers concluded.

“We identified constipation as a potential risk factor independently associated with higher MACE [major adverse cardiac events] prevalence,” the researchers wrote in a journal news release.