A hot head leads to an overheated heart
If you have a tendency to fly off the handle, feel down about things, and hold a grudge, you may be setting yourself up for serious health problems.
This is not new news by any stretch of the imagination. We've known for some time that anger can lead to a higher risk of heart disease.
For a long time, however, we weren't sure as to exactly why anger, hostility and depression caused damage to the heart and blood vessels.
It turns out that the root cause is something I've been researching a lot recently: inflammation. A recent study bears this out. A medical team took a look at inflammation-level-marker levels in the complement system, particularly two that are called C3 and C4, in 313 men who were an average age of 50. The complement system is an important component of your immune system and is activated in response to a perceived threat.
Beginning in 1985, the researchers assessed the men's anger, hostility and depression. Seven years later, they measured their C3 and C4 blood levels, then again in 1997 and 2002. The men who had the highest degree of these types of negative psychological features also had the highest increase in the C3 marker levels from 1992 to 2002. There was no correlation found with their levels of C4.
C3 in particular has been linked to greater risks of heart disease, diabetes and abnormal heart rhythms, due to its propensity to increase inflammation. The researchers also noted that the participants, part of a long-term Air Force Health Study, were extremely healthy to begin with, which discounts the idea that maybe there was an underlying condition leading to the men's psychological responses.
Many factors contribute to inflammation, which I'll be talking more about in the upcoming October issue of Health Revelations. But if you know you tend to react strongly to events or people when feeling provoked, you need to learn some stress-reduction techniques. Some patients have reported to me that something that seems so deceptively simple—counting to 10 or 20 before reacting, closing your eyes and taking three deep breaths through your nose—actually has worked well for them.
