Do you love tweeting about how much you hate certain things? The more hateful your tweets, the more likely you are to develop heart disease, according to a new study.
A team or researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed about 140 million randomly selected tweets from 2009 through 2010. They found that what people tweet directly correlates with their health.
"The single most predictive feature - the single word predictor of heart disease - is 'hate,'" lead researcher Johannes Eichstaedt told ABC News. "You couldn't make this up."
When the researchers looked at what communities the tweets came from, they saw a relation between the rates of heart disease and tweets with the word hate.
Similarly, tweets that were generally happy in nature derived from areas where there was a low rate of heart disease, reported ABC News.
Although looking at tweets is a creative way to determine heart disease risk, Cardiologist Dr. Sahil Parikh, at UH Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, told ABC News readers should take the results with a "very large grain of salt." He said the demographic of Twitter users is much younger than the common age for people who suffer from heart disease.
"I don't know how many 65-, 75-year-old women are out there tweeting," Parikh explained to ABC News. "While there might be a lot of angry young people in a a certain area, I'm not sure how well that correlates with emotional well-being in those who are older and not Twitter users."
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.
