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A heart-shaped balloon floats upward during the Seventh Anniversary September 11 Commemoration Ceremony held at Zuccotti Park in New York City, September 11, 2008. The ceremony remembers those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. REUTERS/Patti Sapone/Pool

Researchers of a new study found a strong association between stress and worse heart attack recovery in young and middle-aged patients.

Busy schedules, unhealthy eating habits and awkward sleeping hours have resulted in a major increase in the amount of stress young and middle-aged people experience. A new study by researchers from the American Heart Association found that this could explain why such people find it more difficult to recover from a heart attack.

“Our study found a significantly higher level of mental stress in women 18-55 years old with heart attack compared to their male counterparts,” Xiao Xu, Ph.D., lead author of the study and assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a press statement.

The study was conducted on 2,397 female and 1,175 male heart attack survivors, 18-55 years old, in the Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes of Young AMI Patients (VIRGO) study. The researchers analysed their health data and measured each patient’s perceived stress during their initial hospital stay.

The first observation they made was that women had worse recovery one month after heart attack on multiple outcome measures such as chest pain-related physical function and quality of life as well as overall health. They also had greater levels of mental stress.

This stress was found to be due to many reasons. While women were more stressed about family issues, men stressed over financial matter. Other stress factors included:

  • Personal injuries
  • Death of a family member or a major illness
  • Loss of business or crop

“We need to think more broadly about our patients,” said Harlan Krumholz, M.D., S.M., the study’s senior author and director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Hospital and a professor in Yale’s School of Medicine and Public Health.

“We have to consider their state of mind and the experiences of their lives," he added.

The study was funded by The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services. Findings were published online in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

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