![]() ![]() Mechanistically, the underlying cause of a heart attack is a sudden rupture of an unstable plaque within a coronary artery. Fast forward from the 1970s to the present era, and a recent study of more than 135,000 men and women in Sweden that found a history of stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by more than 60 percent within just the first year of diagnosis. In other words, external stressors that are not effectively managed have direct internal implications by placing undue stress on the heart. Except in these cases, testing occurred at rest. But it wasn’t until publication of the Interheart study (25,000 volunteers spanning 52 countries) that emotional stress was identified as another key risk factor, accounting for about one-third of heart attacks and strokes. Previously, in the 1970s, when volunteers were asked to begin to count to 100 and then to serially subtract seven’s in quick succession (in a test of “mental stress”), blood vessels constricted as if they had taken and failed a cardiac stress test. We’ve known for decades that smoking, hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes account for most cardiovascular problems. ![]()
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