How the heart reacts to anger seems to predict who’s at risk for a life-threatening irregular heartbeat.
Negative emotions like hostility and depression have long been considered risk factors for developing heart disease.
But research released Monday goes a step farther, uncovering a telltale pattern in the electrocardiograms (known as ECGs or EKGs) of certain heart patients when they merely remember a maddening event.
“Anger causes electrical changes in the heart,” of already vulnerable people, said Dr. Rachel Lampert, a Yale University cardiologist who led the research. “That means those people are more likely to have irregular heartbeats when they go out in real life.”
Anger’s adrenalin rush
To track anger’s effect, the researcher gave EKGs to 62 patients who had defibrillators implanted in their chests because of pre-existing heart disease.
When they recounted something that had made them angry, some patients experienced beat-to-beat EKG alterations. In other words, the emotional stress was producing a red flag like physical stress can. But it did so without causing the jump in heart rate that exercise does, suggesting anger’s adrenalin rush might act directly on heart cells.
The result: people whose EKGs showed a big anger spike were 10 times more likely to have their defibrillators fire a lifesaving shock in the next three years than similarly ill patients whose hearts didn’t react to anger, Lampert reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Next she’s studying whether anger-reducing techniques might help those high-risk patients avoid irregular heartbeats. There’s a clear connection between the heart and the head: chronic negative emotions are somehow heart-damaging. 
“But we haven’t been able to explain why that happens,” said Goldberg, a cardiologist at New York University School of Medicine. “This is a step in the right direction.”
© The Canadian Press, 2009
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