Wednesday, February 25, 2009

ANGRY ? You'll DIE faster !


Anger really can kill, doctors have warned.

Feelings of rage can trigger potentially deadly irregular heart rhythms, research shows.
The finding, from a study of patients with cardiac problems, could explain other studies which have linked the anger sparked by world events - from the loss of a World Cup match to a war - with heart attacks.
'When you put a whole population under a stress factor, sudden death will increase,' said researcher Dr Rachel Lampert.
'Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart.'
Dr Lampert, of Yale University in the U.S., studied 62 adults being treated for an irregular heartbeat - a common condition which raises the risk of heart attack.
She said: 'We found in the lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical instability in these patients.'
Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Dr Lampert's team did a test called T-Wave Alternans that measures electrical instability in the heart.
The men and women, who all had defibrillators implanted in their chests to monitor their heartbeat and shock it back into rhythm when necessary, were then tracked for three years.
Those who were rated as the angriest were more than ten times more likely to need a shock from the device, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports.
However, Dr Lampert cautioned against applying the results to people with healthy hearts.
She is now studying whether anger management classes can help those with the conditions studied - ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation.
Sudden cardiac death accounts for more than 400,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the American College of Cardiology

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