Well, the best option is not to have a heart attack at all. But if you have one and are admitted to the hospital on a weekend, you have a 5 percent higher risk of dying in the following month than if you were admitted on a weekday.

That's the conclusion of a study of about 230,000 patients hospitalized for a first heart attack, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. Most hospitals provide only emergency or urgent care on weekends and reduce their total staff as well as the number of available experts to do invasive procedures like angioplasties.

But here's the silver lining: A large study involving multiple centers in the United States found that you're least likely to suffer a heart attack on weekends and most likely on a Monday.

And many studies have shown that they are most common between the hours of 6 a.m. and noon. Among the possible explanations for this latter finding is that levels of blood pressure and the stress hormone epinephrine tend to be higher in the morning, along with an increased tendency for blood clot formation.

You can lower the risk of a morning heart attack by taking a morning aspirin and using blood pressure medications that control blood pressure over a full 24-hour period. Heart attacks are also more likely to occur in the winter than in the summer. 

In fact, weekends are not a good time to enter a hospital, period, no matter what the health problem. An earlier study showed that weekend hospitalizations were associated with higher mortality for 23 of the 100 leading causes of death, and mortality rates were not lower on weekends for any cause of death.

Of course, this knowledge doesn't mean you can control the timing of a heart attack. Other than following your doctor's recommendations to lower your overall risk of having a heart attack, there is no way to avoid a weekend heart attack. And, by all means, don't delay getting to a hospital if you suffer worrisome chest pains on a weekend.