HomeLifestyleHealth & FitnessStudy finds a link between male anxiety and serious illness

Study finds a link between male anxiety and serious illness

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Risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes occur early in the lives of anxious men.

According to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, middle-aged men who are anxious and worry more may be at higher biological risk for developing heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, also known as cardiometabolic disease, as they get older.

The authors used data from the Normative Aging Study, a longitudinal study of male aging started in 1961 at the US Veterans Outpatient Clinic in Boston, to study the association between anxiety and risk factors for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

The study included 1561 men, whose average age in 1975 was 53 years. They did not have cardiovascular disease or cancer before they started the trial, and they were all assessed for neuroticism.

Neurotics, as you know, have a tendency to see things as dangerous, stressful, or overwhelming. They are more likely to experience unpleasant emotions including fear, worry, despair, and rage.

“Our findings indicate higher levels of anxiousness or worry among men are linked to biological processes that may give rise to heart disease and metabolic conditions, and these associations may be present much earlier in life than is commonly appreciated – potentially during childhood or young adulthood,” said Lewina Lee, lead author of the study.

Worry, the author argues, can be adaptive or detrimental, especially when it becomes uncontrollable and interferes with daily routines. Every three to five years, participants in the study received medical examinations and blood testing. 

Among the criteria used to assess health status, the scientists picked seven risk factors: upper and lower blood pressure, total cholesterol, triglycerides, body mass index, fasting blood sugar, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and an inflammation marker.

Each of the seven risk factors was assigned a score to each participant. The authors indicated that if a person had six or more high-risk markers, they had already developed the cardiometabolic disease.

The number of high-risk variables climbed by around one every decade between the ages of 33 and 65, reaching an average of 3.8 by the age of 65, according to the researchers.

Participants with higher degrees of neuroticism, on the other hand, obtained higher scores across all age groups. They were 13 percent more likely to develop cardiometabolic disease than persons with mild anxiety when demographic factors were taken into account.

SourcE: https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.121.022006

Image Credit: Getty

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