If you've always thought that research claiming health benefits from things like being happy is a bunch of unsupported hooey, you might want to look at a study out of New England in the current Annals of Family Medicine.
Doctors asked 2,816 adults over age 35 with no history of a heart attack: "Compared with persons of your own age and sex, how would you rate your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 5 years?"
Nearly half the men who rated their own risk as "low" would have been classified by objective medical tests as being at high risk. Yet when researchers checked the accuracy of their predictions against death records 15 years later, it turned out that men who believed they were at lower-than-average risk actually had a three times lower rate of death from heart attacks and strokes even after smoking, cholesterol and a dozen other factors were considered.
No such link was found for women, which the researchers speculate may be because the study began in 1990, when heart disease was seen as a threat mainly for men.
So why should optimism make such a difference?
The authors' working theory has to do with perception of risk. When a healthy outcome can be achieved by a simple behavior, such as getting a shot, a heightened sense of risk can be a motivating factor, they write.
But preventing cardiovascular disease involves complicated interrelationships among diet, exercise, drugs, monitoring, and knowledge of constantly changing medical theory. With progress hard to achieve, a heightened sense of risk is less likely to motivate and more likely to cause stress and fear, the researchers say -- and to trigger unhealthy coping behaviors like overeating, alcohol abuse and avoiding the doctor. Believing you are at less risk may actually make it so. "It is not clear whether we should seek to disabuse people of optimistic 'misperceptions' in pursuit of changing behavior," the lead author, University of Rochester Medical Center researcher Robert Gramling, said in a statement. "Perhaps we should work on changing behaviors by instilling more confidence in the capacity to prevent having a heart attack, rather than raising fears about having one." Contact staff writer Don Sapatkin at 215-854-2617 or dsapatkin@phillynews.com.
