In the May 4, 2008 issue of House Calls we talked about improving your risk factors for heart disease—and stress, anger and depression are definitely factors you CAN change!

I know you are concerned with your heart’s health, and your mind and emotional state have a great affect on the state of this essential organ. As a matter of fact, your mental state plays just as much of a role in heart disease as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure!

And, with high cholesterol being found in less than half of patients who have heart attacks, it is becoming very clear that stress, anger and depression make up the “Achilles’ Heel” of the heart!

A study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that stress can cause severe, but reversible, heart problems. And when the researchers compared patients with underlying heart failure who were under deep emotional stress to the non-stressed patients, testing and biopsies clearly showed that stress had, “potentially lethal consequences.” In other words—stress could kill you!

A study by the American Heart Association examined 536 patients who had previously experienced heart attacks. When the anxiety levels were measured, those patients with the highest anxiety scores were four times more likely to suffer from more heart problems compared to the ones with low anxiety.

And depression at least doubles the average C-reactive protein levels, which is the standard blood test for measuring your risk of a heart attack. But if you’ve already had a heart event, depression makes you four to five times more likely to have another event!

The last important risk factor for heart disease is anger. Even childhood experiences of abuse can increase your chances of heart disease later in life if you hold onto those memories on a deep emotional level. And allowing anger to take hold of your body can disrupt the regular electric impulses that keep your heart beating!

Not only do anger, depression and anxiety affect the way you eat and exercise, they also provoke the release of stress hormones and chemicals that create problems in your body. Your blood pressure and blood clotting increase, and blood sugar levels go up—all known causes of plaque build-up in your arteries!

But it’s been shown that your mind can have amazing powers over your body’s negative reaction to stress. For example, psychologist Timothy Smith at the University of Utah measured the heart rates of 82 students after he had given them a stressful task, and then again after he told them to think of someone they cared the most about before they began the task. The results showed a definite lowering of heart and blood pressure!

Laughter, optimism and even quieting the mind have real effects on a healthy heart. Karen Mathews at the University of Pittsburgh examined 209 healthy menopausal women for three years to see how optimism affected blockages of the carotid arteries (arteries on each side of the neck that supply blood to the front part of the brain). What was the result? The most optimistic women had only a 1 percent thickening rate while the pessimists had a 6 percent thickening rate!

Then consider the University of Maryland Medical School participants who watched a funny movie for 15 minutes—there was a clear relaxation of their peripheral arteries (arteries such as those in the mouth, hands or feet that are furthest from the heart) and increased blood flow for up to 45 minutes!

Now imagine what you could do for your heart’s health if you routinely performed this “mind over body” ritual to counteract the negative impact of stress, anger and depression! Your heart and your loved ones would thank you—and your heart’s “Achilles’ Heel” would lose much of its power.