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Stress, anxiety and heart health

Nicolas Raymond
/
freestock.ca via Flickr

Can stress, anxiety and depression cause heart disease? This week on WRVO's health and wellness show "Take Care," hosts Linda Lowen and Lorraine Rapp speak with Dr. Peter Gianaros, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh about his research into how the mind-body connection effects heart health.

Lorraine Rapp: What have you learned about how what we think and feel effect cardiovascular health?

Dr. Peter Gianaros: Well, not as much as we would like. This is still an active area of research. But, the tools that we have now are affording us opportunities that we never had before to look inside the brain and examine what’s going on when people are having a stressful experience or certain emotions. And what we’re trying to do is relate brain experiences to changes in a person’s physiology that might put that person at risk for developing heart disease in the future.

Rapp: How do you create these different emotions so you’re getting an accurate reading of the different things like anxiety and depression and things like that?

Dr. Gianaros: Sure, that’s a great question. If you are a participant in one of our brain imaging studies, what we would do is put you inside of an MRI that allows us to look at changes in brain activity. We could have you perform a task that is quite frustrating. We would also be measuring your blood pressure, the rhythm of your heart, and those are the primary means by which we assess your cardiovascular function simultaneously with your brain activity during stressful experiences and also examine levels of your stress hormones. And these are all things that we believe are connected to a person’s stress response, but then also possibly indicative of that person’s risk for developing disease in the future.

Linda Lowen: So what you’re saying in essence is, if you are studying a hundred people and their responses range from minimal to highly agitated, those people who are highly agitated are the ones who are going to manifest that in the body, in essence. It’s our reaction to stress that’s doing it not really stress itself.

Dr. Gianaros: I would agree with that. Oftentimes there’s a disconnect between what people say and what they’re actually showing physiologically. What we are most concerned about is how people are responding physiologically, because at the level of the body that’s probably what matters most for producing pathology. But that’s not to say that how people appraise the demands they have on them is not important for well-being and possibly also physical health in ways that are not fully understood. The kind of work we’re doing really focuses more on bodily reaction and the changes in physiology that are being orchestrated by a person’s brain.

Rapp: How big of a role does persistent stress play in increasing the risk of stroke and heart attack compared to people who are at risk, let’s say for a genetic predisposition, lifestyle issues? How big a role do you think this plays?

Dr. Gianaros: So I would say that there is good evidence that the risk is probably comparable to a lot of other risk factors that we care a good deal about. So for example cholesterol, I would say that there’s reasonable evidence for having a negative cardiovascular health outcome in the future based on a person’s level of stress or their degree to which they’re experiencing negative emotions, I would say the risk there is comparable to what you would see with cholesterol. Of course other established cardiovascular risk factors, for example family history, age, those are certainly more important. But I would say the risk is comparable to a lot of other established risk factors.

More of this interview can be heard on "Take Care," WRVO's health and wellness show Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Support for this story comes from the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York.