A new study from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis suggests middle-aged and older adults who feel hostile and cynical towards others have twice the risk of experiencing a stroke.
The study, which was released Thursday, also found an increase in the risk of suffering a stroke was caused by high stress and depression, according to Yahoo News!.
6,700 adults between the age of 45 and 84 answered questionnaires about their behavior and state of mind for the probe. Participants were a mix of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic and Asian people. Depressive symptoms, chronic stress, hostility and anger in the adults over two years were evaluated in the surveys, and no experience of heart disease was reported at the beginning of the study.
The research team followed subjects for between eight and eleven years. During this time, 147 of the participants had strokes and 48 had suffered a transient ischemic attack (TIA), which occurs when blood flow to the brain is temporarily blocked, GMA News reported.
Hostility scores were measured by studying cynical expectations a person had about other people's motives, and those found with the highest scores had more than twice the chance than those with lower scores of experiencing a stroke or TIA. Subjects who scored highly on depressive symptoms had an 86 percent greater risk, and those with high scores on chronicle stress had a 59 percent greater risk. However, no connection was found between anger and the risk of having a stroke.
After accounting for age, race, sex, health behaviors and other risk factors for stroke, researchers found associations between psychology and stroke to be the same, Yahoo News! reported.
"There's such a focus on traditional risk factors- cholesterol levels, blood pressure, smoking and so forth- and those are all very important, but studies like this one show that psychological characteristics are equally important," said Susan Everson-Rose, associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study.
"Given our aging population, it's important to consider these other factors that might play a role in disease risk."
The study was published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke.
