Do you ever feel as if anger is literally coursing through your veins? That’s not quite the case, according to a new scientific study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, according to which feelings of anger adversely affect vascular health.
In their research, the researchers divided 280 participants into groups and asked them to recall feelings of anger, sadness, anxiety, or remain neutral for eight minutes. Before this task and several times after it, they measured the condition of the blood vessels of the individuals.
“There have been studies in the past that have linked feelings of anger, anxiety, and sadness to future risk of heart disease,” said lead study author Daichi Shimbo, a professor of medicine in the Department of Cardiology at Columbia University in New York.
When the participants were given the task of recalling sadness and anxiety, their blood vessels showed no significant changes in the monitored indicators – but anger did, Dr. Shimbo said. “It appears that the effect of anger on health and disease may be due to its adverse effect on the health of the blood vessels themselves,” he added.
“While the new research is not the first study to show a link between emotions and cardiovascular outcomes, it sheds light on how the link works,” said Joe Ebinger, MD, associate professor of cardiology and director of clinical analytics at the Smidt Cardiology Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. did not participate in the study.
In this study, the researchers observed three main ways in which anger affected blood vessel health, Shimbo said. First, it made it harder for blood vessels to dilate in response to ischemia, and it also affected cell markers and their ability to repair themselves.
After a group of participants recalled feeling angry for eight minutes, the impact on blood vessels lasted for up to 40 minutes, Dr. Shimbo added. That might not sound so bad in itself, but the cumulative effect is worrying.
“We believe that if you’re a person who gets angry repeatedly, over and over and over again, then you’re chronically damaging your blood vessels,” Shimbo said. “We have not studied this aspect, but we believe that this kind of chronic damage due to anger can lead to chronic adverse effects on the blood vessels,” he added.
Another question that the study did not examine is – what about it? “Anger is a human emotion, and one cannot and should not avoid it,” Ebinger said. The best approach is to learn to process feelings of anger without letting it boil over, said Brett Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
