Is Heart Disease Risk Compounded by Multiple Stressors?

Stress has been considered by health experts as one of the risk factors for heart disease. In fact, the more psychosocial stressors we face in our daily life, the greater risk for us to get heart disease, and such relationship is especially strong for women. This is the findings of a new study conducted by researchers from the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

The research further suggested that women were also more likely to report a higher number of such stressors. In comparison with men, women were more often experienced these clustered risk factors. Women with more psychosocial risk factors in this study were also more likely to be obese, but such association did not seem to be valid for men in this study.

Most past studies have looked at the health effects of psychosocial disadvantages such as poverty, depression and single parenthood separately. In real life, people could have more than just one of these stressors. As such, the researchers decided to look at the effect of several together, including unemployment, divorce, death of a spouse, and high anxiety levels. In the study, the researchers evaluated the identified indicators of psychosocial disadvantage in 6,913 men and women who were followed for more than 22 years.

The risk of heart disease rose with the number of disadvantage indicators, regardless of which one is involved. Having one indicator increased the chance of being diagnosed with heart disease during the course of the study by 28 per cent. Those have 2 or 3 indicators boosted the risk by 56 percent. Individuals with 4 or more indicators of psychosocial disadvantage were 2.63 times as likely as those with no similar stressors to develop heart disease. Furthermore, the effect of psychological disadvantage on heart health was found to be stronger for women. As compared with men, these women were also more likely to be coping with several psychosocial stressors.

In the past, cumulative effects of biomedical risk factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes have been investigated, but there has been little study of how psychological and social disadvantages interact on heart disease risk. These negative indicators together may form a psychosocial risk syndrome similar to a ‘metabolic syndrome’, in which high scores may place an individual at higher risk for disease. Therefore, preventive health efforts should never forget to take societal inequalities that lead to such disadvantages into account.

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