High stress, hostility tied to increased stroke risk

Feeling cynical and hostile toward others and having high levels of stress can significantly increase your risk of suffering a stroke, a new study has warned.
Researchers investigated how psychological factors might influence risk for chronic disease, using data from an ongoing study on cardiovascular disease risk factors in participants living in six US cities.
More than 6,700 adults (ages 45-84; 53 per cent women) completed questionnaires assessing chronic stress, depressive symptoms, anger and hostility over two years.
Participants were 38.5 per cent white, 27.8 per cent African-American, 11.8 per cent Chinese and 21.9 per cent Hispanic. All were free of cardiovascular disease at the start of the study.

In follow-up for an additional 8.5 to 11 years, 147 strokes and 48 TIAs occurred.
A TIA is a stroke caused by a temporary blockage of blood flow to the brain.

Compared to people with the lowest psychological scores, those with highest scores were 86 per cent more likely to have a stroke or TIA for high depressive symptoms.
They were 59 per cent more likely to have a stroke or TIA for the highest chronic stress scores and more than twice as likely to have a stroke or TIA for the highest hostility scores.
No significant increased risk was linked to anger.

"There's such a focus on traditional risk factors - cholesterol levels, blood pressure, smoking and so forth - and those are all very important, but studies like this one show that psychological characteristics are equally important," said Susan Everson-Rose, study lead author and associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
These associations noted in the study were significant even when researchers accounted for age, race, sex, health behaviours and other known risk factors of stroke.
Researchers measured chronic stress in five domains: personal health problems, health problems of others close to the participant, job or ability to work, relationships and finances.

They assessed depressive symptoms with a 20-question scale and analysed anger with a 10-item scale that captured the extent and frequency of experiencing that emotion.
Hostility, which is a negative way of viewing the world, was measured by assessing a person's cynical expectations of other people's motives.
The research was published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.