How are stress and depression related to heart health?
Controlling stress is something that certainly makes ones life more pleasant in may ways. Patients often ask if stress is a problem in terms of their heart health, if being under stress adversely affects them, and the short answer to that is that we really don't know the specific ways that stress might affect the heart. We can speculate easily about stress hormones, the effects they may have on the blood clotting and blood vessels, and there's certainly are examples of people who in acutely stressful circumstance - psychologically stressful circumstance - have had a sudden cardiac arrest, developed heart arrhythmias. There are anecdotal suggestions that stress and heart attacks may be related, but for most people the issue is what kind of long term effect does stress have and what can they do about it. There's no question that if one is stressed, overwhelmed and unable to really deal with the other aspects of your life that would normally make you healthier, then stress could certainly have an indirect affect. A related area is the issue of depression, and there's no question that depression should be found and treated, simply from the point of view of quality of life. Depression can make people less able to comply with the appropriate kinds of risk factor reduction and activities that they need to do. Depression also can have an effect on the heart, albeit in a indirect way.
