Being angry is bad for your health. Even a brief amount of anger could negatively impact blood vessels, increasing the risk of stroke and heart disease, according to a new study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Observational studies have linked feelings of negative emotions with having a heart attack or other cardiovascular disease events,” Columbia University Irving Medical Center Dr. Daichi Shimbo said in the journal article accompanying the study results. “The most common negative emotion studied is anger, and there are fewer studies on anxiety and sadness, which have also been linked to heart attack risk.”
For the study, researchers randomly assigned 280 adults to one of four emotional tasks for eight minutes. They either had to recall a personal memory that made them angry, a personal memory that made them anxious or read a series of depressing sentences that evoked sadness or count repeatedly to induce a state of emotional neutrality.
The researchers then assessed the cells lining their blood vessels both before and after the assigned task to determine if the vessels’ ability to dilate was impaired or if it increased cell injury or the cells’ capacity to repair.
The only one of the four tasks that caused impairment to blood vessel dilation was recalling a personal memory of being angry.
“We saw that evoking an angered state led to blood vessel dysfunction, though we don’t yet understand what may cause these changes,” Shimbo said.
Blood vessels’ ability to relax is important for proper blood flow, according to the American Heart Association. Impaired blood vessels may increase the risk of atherosclerosis, of cholesterol building up in the artery walls, which may increase the risk of stroke and heart attack.
The new study bolsters an AHA report from in 2021 that found mental well-being can positively or negatively affect a person’s health.
Susan Carpenter
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