Doctors have always warned about the negative impact of stress on our body, especially on our heart. A new study comes to underline the idea suggesting that there may a connection between how the way heart handles anger and heart disease and deaths from cardiac arrest.

 

The study is scheduled to appear in the March 3 edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

 

It is the first time when researchers say that changes caused by anger and other negative emotions can predict arrhythmias and may link mental stress to sudden cardiac arrest.

 

“It’s definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase. Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart,” said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

 

To see how exactly anger affects the heart, she and his team of researchers gave EKGs to 62 patients who had defibrillators implanted in the chests because of preexistent heart disease. The participants were asked to recount an event that had made them very angry when they were given these EKGs.

 

The researchers found that some patients experienced beat-to-beat EKG alterations that were similar to irregular heartbeat-predicting alterations that doctors can spot during treadmill testing.

 

Moreover, the study showed that those whose EKGs showed a big anger spike were 10 times more likely to have their defibrillators fire a lifesaving shock in the next three years than other people whose hearts did not have any reaction to anger.

 

“It says yes, anger really does impact the heart’s electrical system in very specific ways that can lead to sudden death,” Lampert concluded.