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Watch Out! Stress Causes Heart Attack

Stress is always a part of our life. But if it is left unmonitored, it can lead to emotional, psychological and physical problems. A few health effects of stress are heart disease, high blood pressure that can lead to stroke, chest pains and irregular heartbeats. It will totally depend on the ability of a person to manage stress.

Stress can be caused due to some physical or emotional changes in the environment that you are required to adjust to it. Once your body is exposed to stress, there will be different signs and symptoms such as dizziness, aches and pains, constant worry, anger, anxiety or compulsive eating. When these conditions go out of control, it can overwork the blood vessels thereby ensuring that stress causes stroke and heart attacks.

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When you understand that you are under stress, you will have to learn how to cope with it. Eating sensibly, curbing smoking and exercising regularly will help in reducing the stress.

Stress Causes Heart Attacks

Hence, we can see that there is a relationship between heart attacks, strokes and stress. It is important to understand how stress causes heart attacks and strokes. The following are few reasons and ways to help control stress.

Blocked arteries

Heart attack is caused when the coronary artery is blocked, thereby cutting off the blood flow to a particular area of the heart. Loss of blood supply to the heart can cause damage to the heart and the tissues. There is no exact reason why this happens. Loss of blood supply to the heart could be one of the reasons why stress causes heart attacks.

Stress Causes Heart Attacks

Damaged blood vessel
Stroke is a medical condition where there is progressive damage to the blood vessels to the brain. This can also increase when there are high levels of chemicals in the body called cytokines. When the stress level increases, it can increase the risk of stroke as this will increase the level of the cytokines. This is one of the reasons why stress causes stroke.

Stress Causes Heart Attacks

Blood Clotting
Increased stress levels can also increase the hormonal levels of adrenaline and cortisol. But there seems to be a significant relationship between stress and risk of having a heart attack. Stress also affects blood clotting, which increases the risk of heart attacks. This is one of the reasons why stress causes heart attacks.

Stress Causes Heart Attacks

High Blood Pressure
High levels of stress can also cause high blood pressure. This can also be one of the reasons stress causes stroke. As the blood pressure increases, this will damage the blood vessels to the brain, thereby leading to a stroke.

Hormonal imbalance
Stress is one of the reasons that causes hormonal imbalance. This will in turn affect the normal metabolic process of the body. Metabolic syndromes such as diabetes cause an increased level of cholesterol. This will put you under higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Story first published: Saturday, December 13, 2014, 10:58 [IST]
Read more about: heart disease