Some people have heart attacks in moments of anger.
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Being angry for even just a few minutes can change the way your blood vessels function, making you more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. This finding could explain why some people experience these events during emotional outbursts.
These results come from a study of young people who appeared to be in good health. Participants were asked to think about past experiences that made them angry while measuring various aspects of their cardiovascular health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one suffered a heart attack or stroke during this process, but they did experience the vascular dysfunction associated with such outcomes.
This suggests that intense emotions may contribute to cardiac events in people who are already in poor health, they said. Shinbo Daichi At Columbia University in New York.
Other types of research suggest that heart attacks can be caused by intense emotional experiences. For example, one study found that in the hour before a heart attack, people were: More than twice as likely to have experienced anger or emotional upset Similar to the same 1-hour period the previous day. However, the mechanism behind this remained unclear.
For the study, Shinbo and his colleagues asked 280 volunteers to spend 8 minutes experiencing one of three different experiences that elicited either anger, anxiety, or sadness, or as a comparison, over time. The participants were randomly assigned to count up to 1000, and various measurements were taken during that time. It was taken.
These include taking blood samples, measuring blood pressure, and measuring the capacity of blood vessels to expand in response to the standard procedure of restricting and then returning blood flow to the arm.
This ability to dilate is considered to be a measure of vascular health, and decreased dilation ability is thought to be related to the health status of blood vessels. more likely to have a heart attack.
In this study, people who were asked to think about and talk about a recent experience that made them angry had a decrease in their ability to dilate blood vessels that lasted about 40 minutes.
“There is a possibility.” [these effects] It occurs regularly throughout the day or week and can have long-term consequences,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Repeated negative emotions can affect cardiovascular physiology over time and cause irreversible damage.”
Vascular reactions did not occur in people assigned to experience anxiety or sadness, or in people in the control group. Additionally, there were no differences between any groups on other measures.
The effect of anger on blood vessel function is consistent with the observation that heart attacks sometimes appear to be triggered by intense emotions. andrew steptoe At University College London. But he says it's not always easy for people to stop being angry. “There are anger management interventions available for people with serious problems, but some emotions are very difficult to successfully modify.”
glenn levin “Although not all the mechanisms of how psychological state affects cardiovascular health are understood, this study clearly shows that such mechanisms We are one step closer to the definition of
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Source: www.newscientist.com
