Did you cook the spaghetti for too long for the umpteenth time, did your son decorate your newly painted wall with marker or did someone push you in line again while you were in a hurry? Don’t get angry, count to ten. Even if it’s just to spare your heart.
American researchers have shown that the vascular wall of your blood vessels comes under pressure, even during short bursts of anger. This type of stress increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke in heart patients, as has been previously shown.
Only anger
And a link has also been found in healthy people between anger and cardiovascular health. The causes are not entirely clear, but what this new study shows is that if we remain relaxed, our blood vessels do the same. Strangely enough, feelings of fear and sadness did not have this effect on the inner lining of blood vessels, although previous research also linked these emotions to heart problems.
“We only saw that anger led to damage to blood vessels, but we don’t yet understand what it is that causes this damage,” said Daichi Shimbo, professor of medicine at the Columbia University.
Bad memories
The researchers divided 280 healthy subjects into four groups, which had to perform a task. The activities each lasted eight minutes. Before and after, blood was taken to analyze the cell walls. The first group had to recall an angry memory, the second group had to think back to a fearful event, the third group read a series of depressing sentences to become sad and the control group had to count to one hundred to remain emotionally neutral. Only when anger was evoked, a constriction of the blood vessels was measurable three minutes after the end of the task. It disappeared again after forty minutes.
Still, bottle it up
Sometimes people say that it is good to let out your anger and not bottle it up. That may be better for your mood or your mental health, but it’s not for your heart. You should be especially careful if you are often angry and are already at increased risk of heart problems, the researchers warn, although it still needs to be more precisely understood 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 added. For example, they may be able to take an anger management course.
Not lumped together
In general, it seems better to count to ten before you explode. It is also not the first study to show that extreme emotions can have an effect on our heart health. The researchers emphasize that not every emotion is the same. After all, no changes in the blood vessels were seen with anxiety and sadness. “That is why we should not lump all negative emotions together when it comes to cardiovascular disease,” they write. Moreover, it is not yet entirely clear how reversible the damage is. It seems that when the anger disappears, the blood vessels dilate again.
It is not the first time that a relationship has been shown between emotions and heart disease. As early as the 1990s, the Japanese discovered the broken heart syndrome tako tsubo mention: As a result of enormous emotional pain or stress, people can have a heart attack. According to research in the US from 2005, 90 percent of the cases involved older women who already have a more vulnerable heart 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 muscles enter a kind 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 had often lost a loved one or suffered another traumatic experience. Their hearts sometimes only functioned at 20 percent, which makes the situation very dangerous. The good news: most recovered quickly. Within 48 to 72 hours, the heart often functioned at 60 percent again. The researchers said it was striking how quickly patients recovered.
