Is it possible for stress to cause a heart attack or stroke, or do stressed people generally have poorer diet, be smokers, etc?
You often hear of people (usually men over 50) having a heart attack or stroke and it being attributed to stress. But can stress actually cause these things to happen, or do stressed people tend to have poor health in other ways eg smoking, drinking, eating unhealthy foods, not exercising, etc?
In: Biology
is likely a combination of things; but that doesnt mean we cant narrow it down to if we remove X behaviors A/B/C wouldnt have caused
stress does create a physical response in the body, and these responses are what could generally lead to a heart attack. stress releases a chemical called cortisol, and this chemical does increase blood pressure and cholestoral and blood sugar. if these remain elevated for a long period of time, your chance of heart attack or stroke are also magnified
Every single thing can either lower or increase the risks of health issues, HA included. So you do your best to live healthy and stay out of stressful events and you increase your chance to meet your grandchildren.
1) Yes
But 2) Also yes.
Stress on its own can cause a heart attack, but stress can also mess with appetite, sleep schedule, blood pressure, heart rate, increased tendency towards substance use.
On the other hand poor diet, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, poor health, substance abuse, etc can all also cause stress themselves.
Stress is often a vicious cycle because many symptoms of stress are also causes of stress.
Mental stress is not known to directly cause cardiovascular anomaly. The concept of stress as a killer is a legacy of days before we understood why people suddenly died – and didn’t know as much about cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, cardiac malformations, and drugs. It’s more likely as you mentioned that mental stress causes poor behaviors that increase risk of cardiovascular events.
But a more evolved look that has been gaining traction is medicine is to try to combine mental and physical factors to treat diseases more thoroughly. While poor mental health may not directly (or in isolation) cause cardiovascular events, they are surely part of the “gumbo” that overall increases risk and by removing ingredients from the gumbo, the threshold for “random” cardiovascular events may increase.
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