is it possible for stress to cause a heart attack or stroke, or do stressed people generally have poorer diet, be smokers, etc?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.