What are the psychological impacts on the heart?
Psychological stress is a well-recognised contributor to heart disease and it can elevate blood pressure. Stress may also lead to a condition called stress cardiomyopathy, which can mimic a heart attack. This condition affects up to 5000 people in the UK every year. In this video, Dr Ravi Assomull discusses how chronic stress affects cardiovascular health and why stress management is essential for long-term prevention.
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Transcript
Stress is a big contributor to heart problems. Stress itself can raise your blood pressure, which we know increases your risk of heart problems significantly. The problem is there's no way of easily quantifying the contribution that stress makes to your overall risk for heart.
We know, in very rare cases, you can get something called a stress cardiomyopathy where stress causes almost what looks and feels like a heart attack, where the heart stops working transiently. But that tends to be very rare. But in general, stress is something that we do recommend that you try to address to reduce your overall risk of heart problems in the future.
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