Inserm researchers in Unit 1018 “Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health”, in collaboration with English and Finnish researchers, have just shown that it is necessary to be vigilant and to attach importance to people claiming to be stressed. In a study that was just published in the european heart journalthey show that the physiological changes associated with stress can have an adverse effect on health.
For this study, the team of Herman Nabi, Inserm researcher in Unit 1018, used a cohort of several thousand British civil servants (the Whitehall II cohort) which contributes to research in social epidemiology on the other side of the Channel. The researchers were particularly interested in people in this cohort who responded that the stress or pressure they had experienced in their lives had a strong impact on their health. They then checked whether there was an association between their feelings and the occurrence of coronary heart disease a few years later.
According to the results of their study, participants who reported that their health was “much or extremely” affected by stress had more than double the risk (2.12 times higher) of having or dying of a heart attack compared to those who reported no effects of stress on their health.
“From a clinical point of view, these results suggest that patients’ perception of the impact of stress on their health can be very accurate, insofar as it predicts such a serious and frequent health event as coronary artery disease,” emphasizes Hermann Nabi. “The main message is that patient complaints about the impact of stress on their health should not be ignored as they may indicate an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease or dying from it. Future stress studies should include patients’ perceptions of the impact of stress on their health.
