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Op tijd je hart luchten en je leeft langer.*
Tijdens een 5 jarige studie onder ouderen bleken zij die
nooit hun hart luchten twee keer meer kans hadden te sterven.
- If you're mad and you show
it, you might just live longer than those who simply seethe, new findings from
an ongoing study of elderly priests and nuns show.
Researchers report those who
failed to vent their spleens were twice as likely to die over a five-year study
period. On the other hand, "the tendency to get angry and do something
about it was not really related to mortality at all," says study co-author
Robert S. Wilson, a professor of neuropsychology at the Rush University Medical
Center in Chicago.
The 1,000 people in the
Religious Orders Study came from all over the United States and included
brothers in addition to priests and nuns. This isn't the first time they've made
the news. In 2002, researchers announced those who kept their minds active
appeared to be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
In their new project,
researchers examined the medical records of 851 subjects from 1994-2002. More
than two-thirds were women, and their average age at the beginning of the study
was 75.
The goal was to examine how
expression -- or suppression -- of anger contributes to life span, Wilson says.
"From the time of the ancient Greeks, people have thought that personality
and the way you express your emotions are related to health. There's a long
history of studying that in medicine."
But while studies have shown
depression is related to shorter life spans and heart disease, there's less
research into how people cope with negative emotions such as anger, Wilson adds.
The priests and nuns are an
especially good group to study, he says, because they live in almost identical
socioeconomic and social worlds.
He and his colleagues noted
when some of the subjects died -- 164 of them did -- and looked at tests
measuring their level of negative feelings and their ability to express it.
Their findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of
Epidemiology.
Over an average period of five
years, the 10 percent of the subjects with the greatest tendency to keep
negative emotions bottled up -- those who "sit and stew" -- were twice
as likely to die as the 10 percent on the other end of the scale.
The winners in the life-span
sweepstakes were those who said, "'I get angry and I slam a door, I curse a
lot,'" Wilson says.
Cursing? Priests and nuns? Yes,
indeed. "The Catholic clergymen and nuns feel the full range of emotion
that everybody else feels," he says.
For now, it's still unclear
how anger management -- or the lack thereof -- affects health. "There are
studies that suggest negative emotions have been related to cardiovascular
disease, and it's possible the mechanism could be through that," Wilson
says. "They've also been connected to immune function and hormonal changes
in your brain."
Dr. John E. Morley, a professor of gerontology at Saint Louis University, says emotional outbursts "remain a better coping mechanism than internalizing and continuing to fret about the reason you are angry." Even so, he adds, people can find healthier ways of releasing their emotions. (2003)