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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Mad science

Are you a door slammer? A horn honker? A dish breaker?

If so, your angry outbursts could be putting your heart at risk.

That’s the conclusion of some Washington State University researchers, who found that outward expressions of anger are an even better predictor of heart disease than smoking or high blood pressure.

“There was a whole lot of excitement and interest in it,” said Dr. Bruce Wright, one of the authors of the study, who helped present the research at a recent conference in Budapest, Hungary.

The study, which is as-yet unpublished, looked specifically at adults older than 50 and found that those who often yelled, slammed doors and threw things when angry were most likely to have calcium deposits in their coronary arteries, a marker of heart disease.

Previous research, however, has found that keeping anger in and not expressing it can also lead to coronary problems.

“It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that,” says Wright, a psychiatrist and an associate professor of psychology at WSU. “Extreme anger perhaps is not a good thing in either form … There’s a lot more work that needs to be done. Right now, there’s evidence that suggests extremes of both angry styles are potentially unhealthy from a cardiovascular standpoint.”

That’s why it’s important to find ways of coping with anger, Wright says.

“It’s not really, ‘Don’t get angry at all,’ ” he says.

Instead, people should examine how to better solve problems, how to let go of stressful situations that have no solution, and how to think about things in different ways so they don’t produce such a strong emotional response, he says.

“The take-home message at this point is probably to learn strategies to manage anger more effectively,” he says.

The finding is the “most noteworthy” research so far out of the 12-year-old Spokane Heart Study, says Dennis Dyck, the study’s acting director and the vice chancellor of research for WSU-Spokane.

“It takes a while for this kind of a study,” Dyck says. “It’s like a fine wine; it’s only going to get better.”

There have been other, larger longitudinal studies around the country, but the Spokane study has been able to work with a stable population unlike others, he says.

“One of the neat things about doing this kind of research in Spokane is that people tend to stay in this community,” Dyck says. “It’s not like a lot of other urban centers where you have a lot of people coming and going.”

Dr. Harold Mielke, who retired from WSU last year, was the study’s founder. Mielke worked with a Spokane cardiologist who recently had purchased an ultrafast scanner that could take pictures of the heart.

They quickly discovered that people who had coronary artery calcification were at greatest risk of having a heart attack.

“Our push was to try to develop a program that would come out and identify people who were at risk of having a heart attack, prior to any actual heart attack or damage to the heart muscle,” Mielke says.

That way, someone at the highest risk would know to seek immediate help upon the onset of cardiac symptoms, such as chest pain or shortness of breath, he says.

So, over the years, the study recruited 1,000 volunteers. Those volunteers have been examined every couple of years over the course of the study.

Originally, researchers recruited people in high-stress professions – such as police officers, firefighters and bank managers – but the study later opened to the general population, Mielke says.

Since the study began, researchers have amassed massive amounts of data, including blood and urine samples, heart scans and responses to lifestyle questionnaires.

“The answers will come out as we follow it,” says Mielke, who originally anticipated the study would last a decade. “Now it’s starting to differentiate out.”

Data collection has been suspended for a bit as researchers cull through what they have, Dyck says.

“We’re inventorying what’s in the freezer,” he says. “There’s all kinds of blood and urine samples in the freezer.”

Researchers will examine many parts of the data, but the biggest component likely will be the genetic links to heart disease, Mielke says.

“The story is not complete by any means,” he says. “But what we have is the means to answer it.”