Dwelling on marital angst can harm your
heart: study
Finishing a marathon and marital
bickering both put stress on your heart, but new U.S. research suggests
fighting is worse than running.
The reason seems to be that emotion
continues to simmer long after the argument is over. Just thinking about the
fight can elevate blood pressure and lead to health troubles.
''Certain people may be at increased risk
for developing heart disease, based at least partly on how they respond to
stress,'' said Laura Glynn, assistant professor of psychiatry at the
University of California at Irvine.
''Developing ways to intervene with
rumination behaviour and encouraging social support for these individuals
may help prevent emotional stress from contributing to heart disease
later.''
The study is published in the journal
Psychosomatic Medicine today.
Doctors have understood for a long time
that stressful marriages or jobs can be harmful to health, although the
mechanisms are not well known.
''I think all of us believe stress plays
a major role,'' says Lyall Higginson, chief of cardiology at the University
of Ottawa Heart Institute.
"When you stop running a marathon,
your heart stops [being stressed]. If you're emotionally upset or grieving
for someone, that can be a long process.''
In the San Diego study, Dr. Glynn and her
colleagues tested 72 university students.
The ''anger'' group was assigned one of
two tasks: counting backward while being interrupted or avoiding an electric
shock. These were designed to frustrate and annoy the students.
Subjects in the ''non-anger'' group were
asked to either walk in place or thrust their hands into freezing water,
tasks that were physical but not emotional.
Although both groups had elevated blood
pressures in response to their tasks, it took twice as long for those in the
anger group to recover to normal levels.
Later, when asked to remember the
experience, the blood pressure of students in the anger group rose by 16
millimetres of mercury, a substantial jump.
Those in the non-anger group did not
experience any change in blood pressure when asked to remember their
experience.
When researchers left members of the
anger group alone after their tasks, these students tended to ruminate over
the experience.
Their blood pressure rose higher than the
anger subjects, who were distracted from thinking about the vexing tasks.
''Preventing the damaging effects of
stress may involve not only reducing exposure to stressors, but also
reducing opportunities to ruminate over past stress,'' Dr. Glynn said. In
other words, she suggested, let bygones be bygones and try not to think
about things too much. -
Brad Evenson National
Post 24 Sept
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