Can anger management help heart health?

Can anger management help heart health?

How’s this for a way to keep health care costs down: learn to control your emotions.

At least that’s what Dr. Rachel Lampert, associate professor of cardiology and electrophysiology at Yale University, is suggesting. In fact, if you’re suffering from an irregular heartbeat, her research suggests that simply learning to control your emotions can potentially help you avoid getting a defibrillator (also known as a “pace maker”) implanted.

Lambert examined 62 people with pacemakers and had them take a mental stress test to determine their T-Wave alternan patterns (something that has been linked to arrhythmia fatalities).

T wave alternans are occasional irregular heartbeats, which can be detected using an electrocardiogram (ECG). People with higher T wave alternans are at an increased risk of potentially deadly cardiac arrhythmias. If you’re at a high risk, doctors will often implant a device called a defibrillator in order to stop any arrhythmias.

During the course of three years, 16 percent of the test subjects experienced irregular heartbeats that engaged their pacemakers. These same people had more T-Wave alterans than the patients who did not experience arrhythmias.

Lampert says that the study “shows what anger does to the heart electrical system; in the laboratory, anger is predictive of having arrhythmias in the future.”

The next step, according to Lampert, is to determine if anger management classes have a positive effect on the heart’s electrical system. “We take people who have defibrillators, measure their T-Wave alternans, and enroll them in a self control program.” She said. “We want to see if perhaps we can improve their quality of life.”

It’s a small study, but it’s hard to argue that people who have pacemakers should be taking it easy when it comes to stress and anger.