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Aug 27, 2009 7:04 pm US/Central
Hopelessness In Women May Lead To Heart Disease
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―
If you ever get that feeling of hopelessness, it could actually be bad for your health. The University of Minnesota released a study that shows middle-aged women with feelings of hopelessness are more likely to suffer from heart disease.
What's surprising is that these women were healthy when they participated in the study.
"I think people don't realize that feelings and emotions effect your physical health," said Sherri Wood, a worker in Minneapolis.
She's right. A new study in the Journal of the American Heart Association looked at more than 500 healthy middle-aged women for two years. They discovered that those women who said they felt they had no future or no goals were more likely to have a stroke or heart attack.
"The diameter of the artery in the neck gets narrower as plaque builds up inside of it, so it would be the women who had higher levels of hopelessness that would have more narrowing of the arteries in the neck," said Dr. Susan Everson-Rose, senior author of the study.
Research showed that women who had high levels of hopelessness had about a years worth of thickening of their arteries verses women who had a low level of hopelessness.
But what stands out the most in the study is that no other emotion seemed to have this negative effect.
Hopelessness really is bad for your heart.
"We also separately looked at global depressive symptoms: the feelings of sadness and apathy and other characteristics of depression and they did not relate to this marker of heart disease," said Everson-Rose.
"I can feel the stress doing me in ... and part of that is why I try to stay healthy by walking when we have an opportunity at lunch rather than sitting at our desk," said Constance Zweber who works in Minneapolis.
Everson-Rose also said that if women recognize that feelings of hopelessness can lead to cardiovascular risk maybe they will be more likely seek to out help.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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