Feeling Frazzled May Raise Heart Disease Risk

The combination of fatigue, increased irritability, and feeling demoralized is medically known as vital exhaustion.  Randy Cohen, from Mt. Sinai St. Luke's-Roosevelt (New York, USA), and colleagues investigated the relationship between vital exhaustion and first-time heart disease in 11 prospective studies that involved 60,610 people without heart disease. The studies had an average follow-up of 6.5 years.  Data revealed that vital exhaustion associated with a 36% increase in risk for first-time cardiovascular disease, when compared to people not experiencing these three psychological factors. The study authors warn that: “[Vital exhaustion]/fatigue is a significant risk factor for incident [cardiovascular disease] in healthy subjects, comparable in potency to some of the other common psychosocial risk factors for cardiac disease.”