The activity that quintuples your heart attack risk today

More than 2,000 Americans die each day from heart problems. To stay out of this group, stay away from a bad habit today that endangers your heart.

The bad habit is losing your cool and getting extremely angry. A study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, shows that when you blow your top, you may also blow your chance at surviving the day. In the two hours after an anger outburst, your risk for a heart attack magnifies fivefold.

“There has been a lot of research on anger; we already know it can be unhealthy, but we wanted to quantify the risk, not just for heart attack, but for other potentially lethal cardiovascular events as well,” says researcher Elizabeth Mostofsky, an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The hope is this might help patients think about how they manage anger in their everyday lives and prompt physicians to discuss medications and psychosocial supports with their patients for whom anger is an issue, especially patients with known cardiovascular risk factors.”

The researchers analyzed nine studies of heart attacks and found “consistent evidence of a higher risk of cardiovascular events immediately following outbursts of anger.”

“It’s important to bear in mind that while these results show a significantly higher risk of a cardiovascular event associated with an angry outburst, the overall risk for people without other risk factors like smoking or high blood pressure is relatively small,” says researcher Murray Mittleman, a Harvard associate professor. “However, we should be concerned about the occurrence of angry outbursts with our higher risk patients and our patients who have frequent outbursts of anger.”