HOT RESPONDERS

Study Links Emotion and Heart Disease

Evidence has piled up linking a strong relationship between excessive emotional stress and an elevated risk of developing and dying of heart disease.

Heart disease and unexpected death has been linked to the following "Type A" personality traits: agressiveness, nervousness, anxiety, impatience, irritability, hostility.

Now in a comprehensive study published this year in Mayo Clinic Proceedings,the underlying physiology that explains these and other factors linked to heart disease are detailed.

Humans come equipped with an autonomic nervous system, a web of nerves that, without conscious awareness, regulates such internal processes as heart rate, cardiac output, breathing rate, etc.

There are two opposing components of this system: the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the body to respond to threats (the fight or flight response) - and the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms things down.

Trouble comes when those people who repeatedly call into play their sympathetic responses for reasons that are hardly life threatening: being stuck in traffic, receiving a letter from the IRS, a broken toaster, for instance.

Chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system increases risk of heart attacks, heart rhythm disturbances and cardiac deaths. Among those who experience an exaggerated heart rate and blood pressure, so called "hot responders" are most at risk.

From an article by Jane Brody, New York Times medical writer, which appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune May 23, 2002.

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