By Margarita Nahapetyan
People who are happy, enthusiastic and satisfied with life are less likely to develop heart disease when compared to people who are less positive, claim American researchers from Columbia University.
For the purposes of the study, a team of investigators followed 1,739 healthy men and women (862 and 877 respectively) for a period of 10 years in order to find out whether their attitudes and emotions had any effect on their health. All these individuals were participating in the 1995 Nova Scotia Health Survey in Canada. At the beginning of the study, the experts assessed the participants' degree of expression of negative emotions, such as depression, hostility, and anxiety, as well as positive emotions like happiness, excitement, enthusiasm, contentment and joy. In addition, trained professionals took into consideration the participants' risk for coronary disease.
The results revealed that over the 10-year study period, the happier people were, the less likely they were to develop coronary disease. In particular, the happiest individuals were 22 per cent less likely to have heart disease when compared to people who fell in the middle of the negative-positive emotion scale. Unhappy people had a 22 per cent increased risk of developing a heart attack or chronic chest pain, compared with those who were somewhat content with their life. The participants who were generally happy, but experienced just a few symptoms of depression, did not see these symptoms increase their reduced risk for coronary disease, researchers wrote.
The lead author of the new research, Dr. Karina Davidson, PhD, professor of medicine and psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, believes that this study is the first to demonstrate such an independent relationship between positive emotions and coronary heart disease. However, Prof. Davidson cautioned that it would be a little early to make definite clinical recommendations without clinical trials that will investigate the findings in future studies. "We desperately need rigorous clinical trials in this area. If the trials support our findings, then these results will be incredibly important in describing specifically what clinicians and/or patients could do to improve health," Prof. Davidson said.
According to the professionals, there are several possible explanations for how positive emotions may protect the heart from disease. These are:
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Healthy lifestyle: Contented and enthusiastic individuals are more likely to sleep better, eat healthier diet, not smoke or smoke less, and be physically more active. All of the above mentioned things are known to reduce the risk of heart disease.
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Physiological impact: Positive emotions may produce a number of positive chemical changes, such as a reduction in stress hormones, that are good for the heart.
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Genetic influences: It could be that individuals who are predisposed to happy emotions are also predisposed to develop fewer heart attacks.
A study is published in the latest edition of the European Heart Journal.
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