BODY WATCH : The Anger Factor : Not long ago, letting rage out was, well, all the rage. Now, studies suggest that venting may up the heart-attack risk.
In the 1980s, doctors often suggested that waving your anger like a flag was good for the head, and cleansing for the soul.
Now, though, the advice is changing: Some recent scientific studies have shown that venting hostility can stir up stress hormones in your body in a way that, ultimately, could damage your heart.
A study by Dr. Murray Mittleman and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School--published this month in the journal Circulation--suggests, for instance, that an angry outburst can more than double the risk of a heart attack in some people.
And Dr. Redford Williams of Duke University--who has been studying about 100 lawyers for decades in an ongoing look at stress--has found that the attorneys who said their anger levels were high in their years as students were four to five times more likely to die in their 50s than their somewhat calmer colleagues.
Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and director of research at the Mind-Body Medical Institute at Harvard, said these studies and others leave little doubt that episodes of anger are dangerous.
“The notion that letting it out is protective,” he said, “is not borne out in science.”
Once a volcanic kind of guy himself, Williams said he has learned to ask questions about his anger, and now lets steam out in less explosive ways.
“You have to effectively understand your feelings,” he suggests, “and find a means of calming yourself down.”
At Duke, Williams has studied the long-term effects of hostility for years, but now is also trying to determine the day-by-day events that contribute to heart disease. For one thing, he says he’s finding that blood pressure goes up when people are exposed to violence--not just to the real-life kind that’s known to cause fight-or-flight hormones to surge, but also to “Rambo”-style movies.
Williams has men and women watch violent and nonviolent clips from movies--”Sleeping With the Enemy,” for instance, and “Falling Down”--while hooking them up to blood pressure cuffs and other monitoring devices.
The scientists also drew blood to test stress hormone levels.
With violence, blood pressure moves up from 2 to 6 millimeters. What’s more, the dose of violence triggers a higher blood pressure surge when an on-screen argument turns into an arm-swinging wrestle. These cardiovascular changes occur only when people are watching violence carried out by someone of the same sex, suggesting that they identify more with the character.
“When you consider how many people watch a movie, and half the population watching it are having a rise in blood pressure, it is important to worry. Over time, that cumulative extra workload could be contributing to an increased risk for cardiovascular disease,” Williams said.
