I was stunned when I read in the newspaper that a team at Harvard University had found proof of why stress increases the chances of heart disease and stroke . It was as if my whole life passed in front of me. I read the article in the Lancet and indeed, they studied 293 people, with an average age of 55, for 3.7 years. In the 22 patients who suffered a heart attack, angina pectoris, heart failure, stroke, or peripheral arterial disease, they found that with positron emission tomography images , people with elevated levels of activity in the amygdala (region of the brain linked to with stress , not the famous angina of our childhood), they had a higher risk of heart disease and stroke.
At that moment I remembered the bad times I suffered, the harmful words, the stress and the reason my husband has, that even though he was not a doctor, he always told me that all this took its toll.
Simultaneously, a German study in 3,428 men, followed for 10 years, has found that 15.2% of deaths from cardiovascular disease were associated with depression, comparable to that caused by other risk factors such as hypercholesterolemia, obesity and smoking.
And if that was not enough, the British Medical Journal has just published a study on 16 prospective studies carried out in England and Scotland, where it is evidenced that anxiety and depression could increase the risk of dying from certain types of cancer , with the caution when interpreting observational studies. They verified in 163,363 men and women, initially without a diagnosis of cancer, who were followed up for an average of almost 10 years, of which 4,353 died from cancer , that those with the highest levels of psychosocial distress (anxiety and depression), more died from leukemia, colon, esophagus, pancreas and prostate cancer.
All these studies suggest that chronic stress is an important risk factor in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and probably cancer, and that just as we control other vascular risk factors such as hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes, stress should be prevented, especially everything in the workplace, where due to the current economic crisis, it seems that everything works. Work may be health, but the end does not justify the means.
But as Mario Benedetti said: ” Don’t give up, you still have time”, although the brain does not learn from the bad, only from the good. You will have to train yourself to control stress.
You may also be interested in Stress: an enemy of the brain as we age; Insomnia and stress: a bad pairing for the brain
Cristina Guijarro Castro, consultant neurologist at Unobrain. CM Caracas in Madrid and Hospital Virgen de la Luz, Cuenca
