Did you overcook the spaghetti for the umpteenth time, did your son decorate your new wall with a marker or did someone push you in line again while you were in a hurry? Don’t be angry, count to ten. Even if it’s just to save your heart.
American researchers have shown that the wall of your blood vessels comes under pressure, even when there is anger. This type of stress increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke in heart patients, as previously shown.
Only anger
And a link has also been found in healthy people between anger and cardiovascular health. The reasons are not entirely clear, but what this new study shows is that if we rest, our blood vessels do the same. Surprisingly enough, feelings of fear and sadness did not have this effect on the inner lining of blood vessels, although previous research also linked these feelings to heart problems.
“We only saw that anger caused damage to blood vessels, but we still don’t understand what causes this damage,” said Daichi Shimbo, professor of medicine at the medical center. Columbia University.
Bad memories
The researchers divided 280 healthy subjects into four groups, who had to perform a task. Each activity lasted eight minutes. Before and after, blood was taken to examine the cell walls. The first group had to recall an angry memory, the second group had to think back to a frightening event, the third group read a series of depressing sentences to feel sad and the control group had to count to a hundred to stay calm emotionally neutral. Only when anger was raised, it was possible to measure the volume of blood vessels three minutes after the end of the operation. He disappeared again after forty minutes.
Still, bottle it up
Sometimes people say it’s good to let your anger out and not bottle it up. That may be better for your mood or mental health, but not for your heart. You should be especially careful if you are often angry and already have an increased risk of heart problems, the researchers warn, although you need to understand more detail how anger can have such an effect on your blood vessels. “Research into the underlying links between anger and blood vessel damage could lead to better treatment for people at risk of heart disease,” Shimbo said. For example, they may be able to take an anger management course.
Not to be combined
In general, it seems best to count to ten before exploding. This is also not the first study to show that real emotions can affect our heart health. The researchers emphasize that not all emotions are the same. After all, no changes were seen in the blood vessels with anxiety and sadness. “That’s why we shouldn’t lump all negative emotions together when it comes to cardiovascular disease,” they write. Furthermore, it’s still not entirely clear how likely It seems that when the anger disappears, the blood vessels dilate again.
This is not the first time that a relationship between emotions and heart disease has been shown. As early as the 1990s, the Japanese discovered the broken heart syndrome take tsubo Comment: As a result of severe pain or emotional stress, people can have a heart attack. According to research in the US from 2005, 90 percent of the cases involved older women whose heart is already more vulnerable due to their lower estrogen levels. People usually get the syndrome after the loss of a loved one, hence the name. Broken heart syndrome occurs because the heart muscle goes into a type of hibernation, we wrote earlier. “The cells are still alive, but they are, as it were, disabled,” said cardiologist Scott Sharkey, who studied more than a hundred patients with broken hearts in 2010. They were often a loved one. lost or had another traumatic experience. Sometimes their hearts only worked at 20 percent, which makes the situation very dangerous. The good news: most recovered quickly. Within 48 to 72 hours, the heart was often working at 60 percent again. The researchers said it was surprising how quickly patients recovered.
2024-05-09 14:02:54
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