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Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, US researchers said on Monday.
Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood.
"It's definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
"Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart," Lampert said.
She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal heart beat.
"These were people we know already had some vulnerability to arrhythmia," Lampert said in a telephone interview.
Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert's team did a test called T-Wave Alternans that measures electrical instability in the heart.
Lampert said the team specifically asked questions to get people to relive the angry episode. "We found in the lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical instability in these patients," she said.
Next, they followed patients for three years to see which patients later had a cardiac arrest and needed a shock from their implantable defibrillator.
"The people who had the highest anger-induced electrical instability were 10 times more likely than everyone else to have an arrhythmia in follow-up," she said.
Lampert said the study suggests that anger can be deadly, at least for people who are already vulnerable to this type of electrical disturbance in the heart.
"It says yes, anger really does impact the heart's electrical system in very specific ways that can lead to sudden death," she said.
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美国研究人员于本周一称，对某些“脆弱”的人来说，愤怒以其它强烈的情绪会触发可能致命的心律失常。
此前的研究表明，地震、战争甚至输掉一场世界杯足球赛都会增加心源性猝死的几率。心源性猝死是一种由心脏突然停止供血而引发的死亡。
位于美国康涅狄格州纽哈芬市的耶鲁大学的雷切尔•朗佩特博士说：“各种证据表明，当某一人群所受压力较大时，该群体的猝死率会上升。”她的这项研究成果在《美国心脏病学会》期刊上发表。
朗佩特说：“我们的研究开始关注情绪如何影响心电系统。”
朗佩特及其同事对62名心脏病患者进行了研究，这些患者都携有可以探测到危险性心律或心律失常，并能释放电刺激使心律恢复正常的植入式心脏除颤（ICD）。
郎佩特在接受电话采访时说：“这些病人容易出现心律失常，而且我们已知道这一状况。”
郎佩特的研究小组让病人进行一项练习，即讲述最近发生的一件令他们生气的事情，同时通过一种名叫“T波交替”的试验来测量病人心电的不稳定度。
郎佩特称，研究人员特意询问一些问题，让病人回忆愤怒的情节。她说：“我们在实验中发现，愤怒的确会增大这些病人的心电不稳定性。”
之后，研究人员对病人进行了为期三年的跟踪回访，调查哪些病人之后出现了心脏骤停并需要ICD的电刺激。
她说：“回访发现，由生气所导致的心电最不稳的病人心律失常的几率是其他人的10倍。”
郎佩特称，这项研究表明愤怒可能会致命，至少对于那些心脏已经易受这种电子干扰影响的人来说是如此。
她说：“研究表明愤怒的确会以特定的方式影响心电系统，从而导致猝死。” |
