In the News – Anxious People Are Twice as Likely to Have Heart Disease?

In non-hair-loss news:

Dr Annelieke M Roest (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) and colleagues performed the first-ever meta-analysis on the association of anxiety with the incidence of CHD in initially healthy people, using data from the US, Europe, and Asia. Even after multivariate adjustment, anxious people had around a 25% greater risk of CHD and an almost 50% higher risk of cardiac death over a mean follow-up period of 11.2 years.

In the second study, almost 50 000 Swedish men who were medically examined for military service and followed for an average of 37 years were assessed by Dr Imre Janszky (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden) and coworkers. Depression was not a predictor for subsequent coronary disease, but those with anxiety disorders—as diagnosed by a psychiatrist—were twice as likely to suffer CHD or acute MI, even after adjustment for baseline confounders.

Read the full article — Anxiety predicts heart disease years later

The meta-analysis combined the results of 20 different studies with nearly a quarter of a million people (it mentions that in the article, but I wanted to highlight it here). It remains to be seen if treating anxiety will also treat heart disease, but I’m sure studies about that will be taking place soon enough.