Older men who experience high levels of stress in their everyday lives are more likely to die earlier than their peers who live stress-free lives, a new study finds.
The study was conducted by researchers from Oregon State University. They looked at two types of stress, which can affect a person's overall health. The first type was the everyday hassles of things like commuting, job stress and family argument. The second was stress associated with more significant events in life like job loss or death of a loved one.
"We're looking at long-term patterns of stress -- if your stress level is chronically high, it could impact your mortality, or if you have a series of stressful life events, that could affect your mortality," said Carolyn Aldwin, director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU, in a press statement. "It's not the number of hassles that does you in, it's the perception of them being a big deal that causes problems. Taking things in stride may protect you."
Both types of stress affect a man's health and each type had different effects on their mortality. For the study, researchers examined stressful life events and everyday hassles for 1,293 men between 1989 and 2005, then followed the men until 2010. About 43 percent of the men had died by the end of the study period.
They noted that half of the men who reported experiencing high levels of stress in their everyday lives died during the study period. This number was only one third among those that reported experiencing fewer everyday hassles. Men who reported few everyday hassles had the lowest mortality rate, at 28.7 percent. Just under half of the men reporting a mid-range number of hassles had died by the end of the study, while 64.3 percent of the men reporting a high number of hassles had died.
A previous study noted that people who experience high levels of hostility, stress and depression are at an elevated risk of suffering a stroke.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Findings were published recently in the journal "Experimental Gerontology."
