Heart Attack and Anxiety
The result of a 10-year study of 740 initially healthy men are now in and they indicate, according to a report in Clinical Psychiatry News (2006, vol. 34/6, p. 63), anxiety is a very strong predictor of future cardiac events such as Myocardial Infarction or sudden death.
A variety of psychological measures had been performed on the men in the study who were originally entered into the Veterans Administration Normative Aging Study in 1986. The average age of the men was 60 and they had neither diabetes nor a history of myocardial infarction (MI). While controlling for a variety of factors in their analysis, the researchers found that anxiety "was an independent and significant predictor of subsequent MI" in the sample.
Even after taking such factors as depression, anger, hostility, type A personality and perceived stress, the single most important predictive factor of MI remained anxiety. The underlying mechanism of just how anxiety may have brought this about is still unknown, but researchers see anxiety as having a possible association with triggering coronary events through plaque rupture, vasospasm, thrombosis and atherogenesis.
The implications of the study are evident in that controlling anxiety is not only good for your mental health and personal relationships, it is good for your physical health.
Related Topics: Enron's Ken Lay Dies: Was it Stress?, Phobias May Put Women's Hearts at Risk
Technorati Tags: anxiety, heart, stress
A variety of psychological measures had been performed on the men in the study who were originally entered into the Veterans Administration Normative Aging Study in 1986. The average age of the men was 60 and they had neither diabetes nor a history of myocardial infarction (MI). While controlling for a variety of factors in their analysis, the researchers found that anxiety "was an independent and significant predictor of subsequent MI" in the sample.
Even after taking such factors as depression, anger, hostility, type A personality and perceived stress, the single most important predictive factor of MI remained anxiety. The underlying mechanism of just how anxiety may have brought this about is still unknown, but researchers see anxiety as having a possible association with triggering coronary events through plaque rupture, vasospasm, thrombosis and atherogenesis.
The implications of the study are evident in that controlling anxiety is not only good for your mental health and personal relationships, it is good for your physical health.
Related Topics: Enron's Ken Lay Dies: Was it Stress?, Phobias May Put Women's Hearts at Risk
Technorati Tags: anxiety, heart, stress
0 Comments:
Post a Comment