- Even brief moments of anger can cause your blood vessels to constrict, raising cardiovascular disease risk, according to a new study.
- Researchers reported that other emotions such as sadness and anxiety did not provoke a similar response in blood vessels.
- Experts say mindfulness practice and meditation could help manage anger responses and mitigate the negative health risks of frequent anger episodes.
Getting briefly angry — but not other emotions such as sadness or anxiety — can raise your risk of heart disease and stroke, according to a
Experts say the findings are not entirely surprising.
After all, “raising one’s blood pressure” is idiomatic for anger, but the researchers from Columbia University in New York wanted to explore what even brief episodes of negative emotions from remembering past experiences do to the vascular system.
Using an established protocol, researchers assigned 280 young adults (average age 26) to one of four tasks designed to trigger an emotional response to anger, anxiety, sadness, or neutrality.
Before, during, and after the tasks, the scientists also measured the participants’ blood vessel dilation and cellular function.
They said they found that participants who experienced a state of anger had impairment in blood vessel dilation in the lining of blood vessels for up to 40 minutes after the initial experience of the emotion. Blood vessel dilation can lead to high blood pressure and related complications, such as heart disease and stroke.
“We saw that evoking an angered state led to blood vessel dysfunction, though we don’t yet understand what may cause these changes,” Dr. Daichi Shimbo, the lead study author and a professor of medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, said in a
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