Stress and heart disease: is the connection exaggerated?
Is stress really bad for the heart?
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaStrong emotions, especially negative ones, are harmful to the heart, both a simple man in the street and a doctor in the hospital will tell you that.
Let's recall the classic scene: the boss yells at the subordinate – and he grabs his heart. Or the son tells his parents that he broke a window at school. Or the girl says at home that… However, what she says there, let the reader figure it out for himself. In general, strong emotions, roughly speaking, are equal to a heart attack. Another risk factor is long–term stress: if you worry about something or someone for a long time, then you can again ruin the "motor".
However, researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center (USA) believe that in this case, as it often happens, the well-known truth rests on somewhat dubious scientific conclusions. The scientists decided to take a closer look at old works that claimed a link between constant stress and strong negative emotions on the one hand and heart problems on the other. Firstly, the researchers focused on the subjective assessment of stress, that is, on those jobs where people were simply asked how uncomfortable they felt. The total statistics of such works amounted to 118 thousand people. As a result, it turned out that subjective stress increases the likelihood of heart disease by 27% – a noticeable figure, but it's still lower than with five cigarettes a day or with slightly elevated cholesterol or blood pressure.
That is, the researchers conclude, there is no need to exaggerate the role of constant stress in heart problems. Moreover, constant, incessant stress is still something implausible, and it is easier to relieve stress, at least for a while, than to get rid of the consequences of smoking.
However, more interesting were the results of meta-analysis of works devoted to sudden severe stress, that is, thereby "grasping the heart". The works on this topic are united in their conclusions: sudden and intense grief, anger, and deep depression increase the likelihood of falling down with a heart attack several times. Moreover, "several times" is an understatement: according to some data, a strong emotional experience increases the likelihood of a heart attack almost twentyfold.
But how are such studies conducted? And here's how: they make rounds of hospitals and interview cardiovascular patients who have successfully recovered from an attack, whether they had any negative experiences before.
Donald Edmondson, one of the co-authors of an article in the American Journal of Cardiology (Meta-Analysis of Perceived Stress and Its Association With Incident Coronary Heart Disease), says that the patient's response is easy to predict: in this case, a person will name the last "negative" that happened to him, even if he was not at all on the eve of the attack. The patient simply connects the last two negative experiences, and as a result we have a purely subjective relationship.
In general, here we should talk about a methodological flaw: collecting such statistics, we do not know exactly what emotions affected the heart and how exactly they affected it. Some, somehow... At the same time, the researchers do not deny the role of sudden stress at all, but, in their opinion, it is unlikely that it increases the likelihood of a cardiovascular attack by more than 2-3%. Although these percentages, of course, cannot be discounted. The conclusion is obvious: not only statistical studies are required, which sin with such psychological distortions, but also experimental studies on animals. In the meantime, the authors of the work advise those who are worried about their heart not to focus too much on restraining emotions: quitting smoking will bring more benefits than anger management.
In this regard, it is impossible not to recall a similar meta–analytical study concerning another "sacred cow" of healthcare - the relationship between overweight and life expectancy. It turned out that this connection is not so obvious and depends on what parameters to take into account, that is, again, some boring methodological claims were made to a spectacular and even a hedgehog understandable pattern. Nevertheless, both the scientific and the ordinary public did not find these claims boring, and serious passions flared up. There is not much noise about the data on stress and heart attacks yet, although this may be due to the fact that the article appeared shortly before the Christmas holidays.
Prepared based on the materials of the Columbia University Medical Center: Is Stress Really Bad for Your Heart?Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru