William Atkins
Tuesday, 24 February 2009 22:05
Science -
Health
Page 1 of 4
A U.S. medical study has looked into whether the emotion of anger can cause arrhythmias (commonly called irregular heartbeats) in the body of patients with implanted defibrillators. What they found could kill you, or prompt you to control your anger!
The authors of this study included
Rachel Lampert, from the Yale University School of
Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut.
Their article “
Anger-Induced T-Wave Alternans Predicts Future Ventricular Arrhythmias in Patients With Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators” is published in the
Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The authors knew from past medical studies that anger can cause ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation in the heart and induce T-wave alternans (TWA).
Ventricular fibrillation (sometimes abbreviated V-fib or VF) is a condition where uncoordinated contractions of the cardiac muscle occurs within the ventricles in the heart.
TWA (or, T-wave alternans) is a phenomenon that shows on an electrocardiogram (ECG, or EKG) in which a
wide variation in the regularity of heartbeats is seen (and recorded).
Such irregular contractions make the heart work improperly, which causes a medical emergency—a cardiac arrest.
Besides Lampert, the other authors are: Matthew Burg (also from Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System,
West Haven), Craig McPherson, Robert Soufer (also from
Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System), William Batsford—all from Yale University School of
Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut—along with Vladimir Shusterman and
Anna Goldberg (both from PinMed Inc. and University of Pittsburgh,
Cardiovascular Institute, Pennsylvania).
Page two continues with the process they went through to conduct this experiment.
