Good news: Sex is safe for most heart patients. If you're healthy enough to walk up two flights of stairs without chest pain or gasping for breath, you can have a love life.

That advice from a leading doctors' group on Thursday addresses one of the most pressing, least discussed issues facing survivors of heart attacks and other heart patients.

In its first science-based recommendations on the subject, the American Heart Association says having sex only slightly raises the chance for a heart attack. And that's true for people with and without heart disease.