Being Angry All the Time Hurts Heart

Fuming or furious frequently? Learning to soothe your
chronic anger may help your heart.

A new report shows that having a short fuse may shorten the path to heart
disease in men with prehypertension (blood pressure above normal but less than
the high blood pressure range).

So the researchers, who work at the Medical University of South Carolina,
reason that those men may do their hearts a favor by learning to tame their
chronic anger.

The same might be true of women, but it's going to take further studies to
be certain of that. Meanwhile, there's no downside to healthy anger
management.B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B

Data came from 2,334 U.S. adults aged 48-67. They were followed for four to
eight years during the 1990s.

Compared with less angry men, chronically angry men with prehypertension
were moderately more likely to develop high blood pressure (hypertension) and
heart disease during the study.

The same wasn't true of women, perhaps because few women developed heart
disease during the study, note Marty Player, MD, colleagues.

For men and women alike, long-term psychological stress was linked to heart
disease.

The results didn't change when the researchers factored in participants'
age, sex, race, smoking status, and LDL ("bad") cholesterol.

However, Player's team couldn't control for every conceivable risk factor
for heart disease.

The study appears in the current edition of the Annals of Family
Medicine.

By Miranda Hitti
Reviewed by Louise Chang
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