Letters to the Editor
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most study's results are "far more subtle" than the cursory reading Broadsheet gives them
So, I encourage you to stop skimming and read up on your science, your statistics, and try resarching deeper than NY Times' headlines.
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Or maybe,
the social and environmental factors underlying anger (those giving rise to stress, anxiety and insecurity) are also related to CAD?
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If I could
Just punch one random stranger each day, in the head. I would float on a cloud of inner peace.
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Why is it that women venerate anger?
I never understood the mindset of thinking it's a compliment to be called a "bitch." Or to glory in ripping someone's head off verbally because, oops, you have PMS. I mean, great, you can revel in your status as allegedly powerless victims of that nasty 'ol patriarchy. Whatever that means. But anger almost never solves anything, frequently just makes things worse, and is often the first step on the road to a meaningless confrontation that may cost you your life. You know, come down with "road rage", flip out, and end up getting shot.
So why do the women who read this website, most of whom are white, upper middle-class ladies who have not ever had to, say, scrub toilets to put food on the plate, so into anger? Even a study like this, that points out that rage might not be too healthy, has to receive that jab at the end about how, well, the results are a "lot more subtle" or whatever -- i.e., we reserve the right to be bitches, whatever the doctors say.
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Diagreeing completely with previous comments,
I think Catherine has done a good job of picking up on matters of import such as the cross-sectional nature of the study and what that implies (inability to ascertain temporal sequence of cause-and-effect). She has clearly done more than read over the MSM's reports on the study, and has done a good job of explaining the conclusions the authors arrived at.
One thing I would add - granted, there's a long history of excluding women from cardiovascular disease studies, but a lot of those, including the two she cites, were interventional studies, i.e. medications were given. In the case of the MRFIT trial, one of the medications turned out to be harmful. Women were excluded because it was thought most efficient to focus intervention studies on the group who was most likely to develop the disease of interest. That meant middle-age or later men. A second concern was that investigators did not want study subjects who could become pregnant being exposed to those drugs. A third concern (essentially financial) was simply that because women are physiologically different enough that the study population would need to stratified by gender, the study sample would need to be doubled in size to achieve statistical significance.
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society is way more tolerant of hysterical women
if a man had stormed angrily into that marine's home, he would have been much more likely to be deemed a threat. a man probably wouldn't have been able to get away with doing that.
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I've always had the hots for Joan Crawford
Those angry crazy physically violent bitches do it for me. God how I love them all.
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The link here is well-understood
There are many things about this connection that are already well-known by researchers:
1. Three key players in hypertension and heart disease are the levels of angiotensin II, aldosterone, and aldosterone-converting enzyme (ACE) in the body. ACE is found in the adrenals, and is the limiting factor in the manufacture of angiotensin II, which is then converted to aldosterone. High aldosterone plays an enormous role in promoting heart disease; so cardiac patients are often given ACE-inhibiting drugs in order to lower aldosterone levels and thus slow the progress of their disease.
2. When the body is under stress, adrenal function increases -- which can increase ACE and hence aldosterone production as well. Over time, if the adrenals stay cranked and aldosterone levels remain high, you'll get the cluster of symptoms known as hypertension -- the first step on the heart disease highway.
3. Many people have genetic polymorphisms that naturally increase the production and interaction of these substances, and thus make them much more susceptible to both lifelong hypetension and early-onset heart disease.
4. One of the first signs that the levels of these substances are out of whack is an increase in aggressive behavior. People born with the genetic polymorphisms are often more aggressive from childhood forward. Those whose levels whack out due to stress are also under the inflence of a known chemical aggression-accelerator. (There's a physiological reason that stressed people get crabby.)
So it makes sense that people who are under stress and/or in the early stages of heart disease would, indeed, be more aggressive. Their adrenals are overloaded, and they're running higher levels of enzymes and hormones known to create angry behavior.
The answer to the chicken-and-egg question is implicit in this, too. People who are born with the genetic SNPs are constitutionally more aggressive; and their built-in chemical imbalances are likely, in time, to drive them into heart disease. Their aggression levels are a side effect of these imbalances -- though the negative social effects of lifelong bad attitude will certainly feed the cycle by raising environmental stress levels as well. (Are Type A personalities genetic? It's starting to look that way.)
People who start out without this liability can undergo external stress that also leads to hypertension and eventually heart disease. For them, the aggressive behavior is also a side show -- but it's also a serious symptom that the adrenals are in distress, ACE is rising, and hypertension is advancing. In either case, as the disease progresses, the levels swing further out of range, setting up a vicious cycle that may further increase the aggressive behavior, which in turn raises stress, which in turn increases hypertension and heart damage.
I am not a doctor (just an old medical writer); and my understanding of this is lay at best. But my larger point is: the relationship between stress, stress chemicals, hypertension, aggression, and heart disease is pretty well-plowed territory. It doesn't inspire confidence in the writers of this study that they were apparently unaware of the literature that would have enabled them to make these connections.
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A little late, but
I'm missing the relevance of mentioning that the party was thrown by a Marine?