Multiple Psychosocial Stressors Boost Heart Risk

Psychosocial stressors such as poverty and depression can adversely affect your health, and in particular your heart. Now a new study has found that if more psychosocial stressors are present in the daily life of a person, he/she faces compounded heart disease risk. According to the researchers, women are especially prone to this effect. There have been many studies on the effects that psychosocial disadvantages such as poverty, depression and single parenthood can have on human health. However, all of them looked at individual disadvantages

Considering the fact that such psychosocial stressors are rarely present individually, Dr. Rebecca C. Thurston of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Dr. Laura D. Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston decided to focus on the effect of multiple stressors together. The two researchers covered unemployment, divorce, death of a spouse, and high anxiety levels in addition to the above three in their study.They followed 6,913 men and women for a period of more than 22 years to evaluate the effects of these indicators on them and found that having just one indicator of psychosocial disadvantage increased the chances of being diagnosed with heart disease by 28%. This increase was over the course of the study. If two or three indicators were present, they found this risk to increase by 56%. Volunteers who had four or more psychosocial stressors present through the study period were found to be 2.63 times more likely to develop heart disease compared to those with no similar stressors. Risk was found to increase in direct proportion to the number of disadvantage indicators regardless of the actual indicators involved. “At least in reality, people don’t have one stressor at a time, these things tend to cluster,” said Dr. Thurston, pointing out that while cumulative effects of biomedical risk factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes on the heart have been studied, those of psychological and psychosocial factors have been left largely untouched. “These multiple forms of disadvantage may together comprise a type of ‘psychosocial risk syndrome,’ akin to a metabolic syndrome, in which high scores may place an individual at high risk for disease,” the researchers wrote in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. They also found that women faced a greater risk of heart disease due to psychosocial disadvantages compared to men; this was largely on account of their having to cope with more psychosocial stressors at the same time than men. According to the researchers, this gender difference was more significant because of the fact that women with high levels of stressors were also more likely to be obese. “Women more often experienced these clustered risk factors as opposed to men,” Dr. Thurston said. “As a woman the more psychosocial risk factors you have the more likely you are to be obese and this in turn increases your risk of heart disease,” Dr. Thurston explained. “For the men in this study, psychosocial risk was not really associated with obesity.”According to the researchers, societal inequalities that cause such disadvantages should be taken into account while making preventive health efforts to treat heart disease.

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