Anxiety in Youth Linked to Adult Heart Disease
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
A Swedish research study recently released very startling claims regarding the effect of stress experienced early in life on the heart as an adult. The study, conducted by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, asserts that while the connection is not completely clear, youths that experience stress in their late teens or early twenties are much more likely to experience heart disease or heart attacks than their more mellow peers.
The Swedish study followed the medical histories of 50,000 Swedish men born between the yeas of 1949-1951 for roughly 37 years. This was made possible because Sweden has a universal healthcare system that maintains detailed medical records of all patients ever treated. It was found that patients that suffered from anxiety disorders, not just common stress, were twice as likely to suffer from heart disease and two and half times more likely to experience a heart attack in adulthood. A general anxiety disorder is characterized by excessive and irrational worry and physical symptoms like fatigue, headaches, trembling, sweating, panic and nausea.
Some common forms of anxiety disorders are: panic disorder, when a person suffers from a brief attack of intense terror or apprehension; phobias, the largest of the anxiety disorders and characterized by intense fear of a particular stimulus; social anxiety disorder, the intense fear of public scrutiny or embarrassment; obsessive compulsive disorder, characterized by obsessive repetitions of acts and post traumatic stress disorder which occurs after a traumatic experience.
One common belief as to the connection between anxiety and heart disease is the increase in adrenaline during times of stress. The body creates adrenaline but then has a negative response to it. It can affect the fatty plaque that lines our coronary arteries, and if they that plaque bursts, it can create clots in our system or lead to a heart attack. Some experts believe that this connection has yet to be fully explored or researched and do not subscribe to the idea of youthful stress causing adult heart disease.
It is believed that roughly 28 percent of people are diagnosed with anxiety at some point in their lifetime. If you or someone you know is suffering from this condition, contact a healthcare provider near you for support. Not only can anxiety affect your life now, according to this study it can affect your life much further down the road.
