CHICAGO, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Anger and other strong
emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in
certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on
Monday.
Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or
even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase
rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the
heart stops circulating blood.
"It's definitely been shown in all different ways that
when you put a whole population under a stressor that
sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study
appears in the Journal of the American College of
Cardiology.
"Our study starts to look at how does this really affect
the electrical system of the heart," Lampert said.
She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart
disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs
that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias
and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal
heart beat.
"These were people we know already had some
vulnerability to arrhythmia," Lampert said in a
telephone interview.
Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which
they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert's
team did a test called T-Wave Alternans that measures
electrical instability in the heart.
Lampert said the team specifically asked questions to
get people to relive the angry episode. "We found in the
lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical
instability in these patients," she said.
Next, they followed patients for three years to see
which patients later had a cardiac arrest and needed a
shock from their implantable defibrillator.
"The people who had the highest anger-induced electrical
instability were 10 times more likely than everyone else
to have an arrhythmia in follow-up," she said.
Lampert said the study suggests that anger can be
deadly, at least for people who are already vulnerable
to this type of electrical disturbance in the heart.
"It says yes, anger really does impact the heart's
electrical system in very specific ways that can lead to
sudden death," she said.
But she cautioned against extrapolating the results to
people with normal hearts. "How anger and stress may
impact people whose hearts are normal is likely very
different from how it may impact the heart which has
structural abnormalities," she said.
Lampert is now conducting a study to see if anger
management classes can help decrease the risk of
arrhythmia in this group of at-risk patients.
Sudden cardiac death accounts for more than 400,000
deaths each year in the United States, according to the
American College of Cardiology. (Editing by Maggie Fox
and Vicki Allen)
Daybreak Counseling Service
www.daybreakservices.com
