Anger and Cardiovascular Disease: An Old and Complicated Relationship

Negative feelings have long been related to health problems. Buddhism, for example, refers to anger as one of the three “poisons of the mind” (greed, anger and madness). In the first edition of Circulation, there was already an article suggesting the association between stress and cardiovascular disease.

In the last decades, several studies have tried to correlate psychosocial factors, such as anger, anxiety, depression and stress, with coronary artery disease (CAD), demonstrating the increase in the incidence of CAD in patients with a higher incidence of these psychic conditions, for example, with a marked increase in events of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) between 2008 and 2009, in the United States, when there was a stock market crash.^– This relationship tends to be significantly more important in women, since factors such as low socioeconomic status and double working hours (conciliation of employment with maternity), among other factors, are more common in the female population. More recently, a longitudinal study of cohort was able to demonstrate the association between the activity of the cerebral amygdala (area involved with the emotions) and the increased risk of cardiovascular events.

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