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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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How Does Stress Affect Heart Attack Recovery? Heart attack seems to be fairly scary because heart attack damages heart muscles, and some heart attack victims might end up with death. In reality, most people survive their first heart attack and return to their normal lives, provided they make some changes in their lifestyle and take medications as prescribed by their doctors. Stress does play an important role in a person's ability to recover from a heart attack, as a study showed. Researchers from Yale University found that younger and middle-age men and women who had more mental stress in their lives tended to have worse recovery a month after a heart attack than those under less stress. Though a previous study had actually suggested a link between higher levels of perceived stress and poorer health outcomes and death rates in older heart attack patients, there is little information available regarding this connection in younger people. In the new study, women were found to experience greater mental stress than men, and because of this, women generally recover worse than men after heart attack. Each year in the United States, 35,000 women under the age of 65 experience a heart attack. Their findings were published online February 9, 2015 in ‘Circulation’, a journal of the American Heart Association (AHA).
Data from 2,397 female and 1,175 male heart attack survivors were analyzed. All of them, aged between 18 and 55, were participants from a study known as Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes of Young AMI Patients (VIRGO). VIRGO is a prospective observational study of young and middle-aged adult heart attack patients from more than 100 hospitals in the United States, Spain and Australia. As pointed out in the report, women had a significantly higher level of mental stress and had worse recovery a month after heart attack on multiple outcome measures, such as chest-pain-related physical function and quality of life as well as overall health. The report also indicated that women were more likely to concern about family issues while men were more likely to worry about financial matters. Higher level of mental stress has been known to affect blood flow in the heart and is associated with hardening of arteries. In fact, researchers at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health has shown that younger women with a recent heart attack are more likely than men of the same age to experience inadequate blood flow to the heart, or what is called myocardial ischemia, in response to emotional stress. Myocardial ischemia, also known as cardiac ischemia, can damage the heart muscle, reducing its ability to pump efficiently. But more research is required to fully understand the mechanisms behind this complex process. Besides stress, some research has suggested that women and men experience different heart attack symptoms. The difficulty in recognizing heart attack symptoms might prevent women from getting earlier treatment. Women who have heart attack also tend to be sicker than men prior to the attack that might complicate their recovery. Nevertheless, the study did not address the exact reasons why stress causes worse heart attack recovery. Other health experts not involved in the study speculated that it could be that people who have greater amounts of stress might not feel like exercising, quitting smoking, eating heart-healthy foods and taking their medications. The study, which is one of the few studies that examines how psychosocial factors affect recovery, cautioned doctors that they should pay attention to the life situations and mental state in addition to physical health when caring for younger heart attack patients, especially younger women. They should be more proactive in assessing women's stress levels, anxiety and depression. Strong evidence suggested that psychological treatments, particularly cognitive-behavioral therapy, could help patients manage stress. The treatment could improve patients' psychological well-being and potentially prevent medical complications from occurring, and also help in recovery after they have occurred.
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