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Summary High levels of stress in their daily lives are more likely to develop heart disease.
While the finding isnt surprising, the review gives a clearer picture of the relevant research to date.Everybody knows that stress is bad for your heart... but the evidence has been scattered out over the years, said Donald Edmundson, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center and one of the authors of the study.Starting with a large British study from the 1960s that found an increased heart disease risk among poor people, researchers have linked stress to poor heart health.And just this year, a study of 200,000 people in Europe showed that those who have stressful jobs are more likely to receive a diagnosis of heart disease than people whose jobs are less demanding and offer more freedom (see report of September 14, 2012).To get a better grasp of what the research has had to say about peoples own perception of stress and their heart disease risk, Edmundson and his colleagues gathered the results of six large studies on the topic.Nearly 118,000 people participated in the studies, which surveyed the participants about the stress in their lives.Some studies used a scale of how frequently or how severely the people felt stressed out, while others used a simple yes or no response to the question of whether someone had felt stressed.At the beginning of the studies, none of the participants had been diagnosed with heart disease.Over follow-up periods - anywhere from three to 21 years - the researchers tracked how many of those surveyed developed coronary heart disease, a condition in which the hearts arteries narrow due to cholesterol-rich deposits. Eventually, the buildups can snag the blood flow to the heart and cause heart attacks.
