Mentally stressed young women with heart disease have reduced blood flow to heart
November 16, 2014
Science Daily/American Heart Association
Young women with stable coronary heart disease are more likely than men of the same age to develop reduced blood flow to the heart if they're under emotional stress. Women 55 years and younger under mental stress had three times greater reduction in blood flow to the heart than men.
Compared to men of the same age, when subjected to a mental stress test, women:
· age 55 and younger had three times greater reduction in blood flow to the heart;
· age 56-64 had double the reduction in blood flow to the heart; and
· age 65 and older had no difference in blood flow to the heart.
"Women who develop heart disease at a younger age make up a special high-risk group because they are disproportionally vulnerable to emotional stress," said Viola Vaccarino, M.D., Ph.D., study author and chairwoman of Cardiovascular Research and Epidemiology at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia.
Women generally develop heart disease later in life than men. However, younger women who have premature heart attacks are more likely to die than men of similar age. Risk factors, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, don't explain these mortality differences.
Young and middle-age women may be more vulnerable to emotional stress because they face considerable burden of stressors in everyday life such as managing kids, marriage, jobs and caring for parents, Vaccarino said. Biology may also play a role -- for example, a greater propensity towards abnormal blood vessel function during emotional stress, such as exaggerated constriction of coronary or peripheral blood vessels.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141116094330.htm
Well-being in later life: The mind plays an important role
July 7, 2017
Science Daily/Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health
Well-being in later life is largely dependent on psychosocial factors. Physical impairments tend to play a secondary role, as scientists have discovered.
"Aging itself is not inevitably associated with a decline in mood and quality of life," says Prof. Karl-Heinz Ladwig, summarizing the results. "It is rather the case that psychosocial factors such as depression or anxiety impair subjective well-being, the Head of the Mental Health Research Group at the Institute of Epidemiology II, Helmholtz Zentrum München and Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine at the TUM University Hospital explains. "And in the case of women, living alone also plays an important role."
"To date the impact of emotional stress has barely been investigated"
For the current study, Prof. Ladwig and his team relied on data derived from about 3,600 participats with an average age of 73 who had taken part in the population-based KORA-Age Study. "What made the study particularly interesting was the fact that the impact of stress on emotional well-being has barely been investigated in a broader, non-clinical context," explains PD Dr. Karoline Lukaschek, epidemiologist in the Mental Health Research Group and lead author of the paper. "Our study therefore explicitly included anxiety, depression and sleep disorders."
Generally high levels of well-being but...
To ascertain levels of subjective well-being, the scientists used a questionnaire devised by the World Health Organization (the WHO-5 Well-Being Index) with a score range of 0 to 100. For the purpose of analysis, they divided the respondents' results into two categories: 'high' (score > 50) and 'low' (score ? 50). The subsequent evaluation revealed a high level of subjective well-being in the majority (79 percent) of the respondents. The average values were also above the threshold set by the WHO. In the 'low' group, however, there was a conspicuously high number of women: about 24 percent compared to 18 percent for men.
Depression and anxiety disorders are the biggest risk
Trying to uncover the most important causes for subjective well-being, the scientists mainly identified psychosocial factors: above all, depression and anxiety disorders had the strongest effect on well-being. Low income and sleep disorders also had a negative effect. However, poor physical health (for example, low physical activity or so-called multimorbidity) seemed to have little impact on perceived life satisfaction. Among women, living alone also significantly increased the probability of a low sense of well-being.
"The findings of the current study clearly demonstrate that appropriate services and interventions can play a major role for older people, especially for older women living on their own," Prof. Ladwig says, categorizing the results. "And this is all the more important, given that we know that high levels of subjective well-being are linked to a lower mortality risk."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170707095413.htm