Stress is a cause of heart attacks, a major international study has confirmed. The Interheart study among more than 24.000 people in 52 countries, half of whom had experienced a heart attack, found that 'psychosocial factors' including work and home stress increased the risk of a heart attack two and a half times, while smoking increased the risk nearly three times. Annika Rosengren, professor of cardiology at Goteborg University, Sweden, led the stress aspect of the broad Interheart research project, the findings of which were published in The Lancet on 11 September 2004.

Professor Rosengren said: 'Persistent severe stress makes it two and a half times more likely that an individual will have a heart attack compared with someone who is not stressed.' She added that stress and depression together increased the risk threefold. Long-term work stress had the most dramatic effect, the research team found. Of those still working who had suffered a heart attack, 23 per cent said they had experienced several periods of work stress compared with 17.9 per cent of a control group that hadn’t suffered a heart attack. In the heart attack group, 10 per cent said they had experienced permanent work stress during the previous year, compared to 5 per cent in the control group.
Source: The lancet, 2004.

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