What makes Carrie Tone run? Undoubtedly not a healthy heart, because her heart is not healthy.
Carrie Tone is an energetic 80-year-old who had a stroke three years ago. Currently, her heart sometimes beats extremely unequally so she even jokes that it’ll never tick steadily again. However, that doesn’t seem to hold her back: Still she makes the best apricot preserves this side of her native Mississippi, and with a little bit of planning she can juggle all four grandchildren at once.
Carrie Tone, the wonder of her neighborhood, is the kind of person that some heart specialists would like to take a hard look at. It has already been obvious to them that decreasing high cholesterol and reducing high blood pressure may diminish a person’s risk of experiencing coronary heart disease. Currently, medical researchers are testing how having a positive personality and positive attitude to life- Tone is an determined optimist - might do the same thing.
Some time ago, when healthcare providers talked about personality traits and heart disease, they talked mostly about so-called "type A" personalities - hostile, driven by a desire to achieve success, time-driven people who seemed fated to fall prey to heart attacks. But there’s a new category that physicians are now using to predict risk - type D. The "D" stands for "distressed" - and Carrie Tone is about as far from being diagnosed with this heart attack risk as you can get.
From A to D
At the 2001 annual meeting of the American Heart Association, the scientists were considering the implications of the type D personality on heart health. Lynn Doering, RN, DNSc, associate professor at the UCLA School of Nursing, is convinced that type D personalities are recognized by their negative feelings: The glass of water is always half-empty, never half-full.
According to Doering, the relationship between negative emotions and reduced long-term survival of patients suffering from heart disease is already well established. But the majority of past research has looked only at clinical depression. One latest example, known as the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study, proved that people who have been diagnosed with major depression have a considerably higher risk of experiencing heart disease than others, Doering claims.
But how about those patients who don’t demonstrate symptoms of full-blown depression but still usually think pessimistically? In other words, what about the type D personality?
A flurry of European research has shown that a person with type D personality - a "negative thinker" who is afraid of usual, everyday events - has four times greater chance of having a heart attack than others, according to Johan Denollet, PhD, a professor of health psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Denollet is an author of three of the studies, involving a total of seven hundred heart patients.
Pessimists Among Us
Type D people "seem to be very normal," Denollet explains: Frequently, they don’t seem either excessively anxious or dangerously depressed. "They may be extremely successful at jobs. They may not look like they are experiencing negative emotions."
Denollet and his team have proven, however, that men and women who become easily worried over insignificant problems, and who bottle up those feelings, are far more probable to die of heart attack than people who cope with stress more easily and express their emotions.
Tone, a fruit canner and grandchild-watcher, is a good example of the opposite of type D. She lets off steam very often, however in a socially acceptable way - airing her gripes with a trusted friend or relatives - and her laments are laced with humor. "Well, that was just clear off nutty," she will say in her Southern drawl, when recounting a latest slight or inconvenience.
"If you are open to other people, it helps," Denollet claims. "On the one hand, you obtain some relief [from the stress] but on the other hand, you help build intimacy." And, what’s more, "opening up provides the opportunity that a problem will become resolved, and gives [you] a sense of some control."
Distract Yourself From Stress?
It is not only the way of responding to stress that may adversely influence your cardiovascular system, but also the way you recover from it, explains Margaret Heitkemper, RN, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Systems at the University of Washington in Seattle.
According to Heitkemper, stress is able to affect negatively the immune system. The studies conducted by Heitkemper involves making volunteers do such things as hold their hands in icy water or read words printed in eye-poppingly garish hues.
What she has discovered, not surprisingly, is that some people are naturally under stress even before being put in a stressful situation. And once their hormones begin to jump and blood starts pumping, some people need much more time to calm down than others. A stressful situation can also lead to the situation that some people’s immune systems reacts in a way that impairs their body’s response to further stress - a potentially unhealthy cycle.
But how stress is experienced by particular person depends on who it is acting on. Taking care of grandchildren may constitute an overwhelming strain for one person, but it may be only a bump on the road to happiness for another. "I can’t overdo it," Tone talks about her babysitting duties. "I’d go over the edge. But if I didn’t do anything, that would be just as bad–probably worse."
This phenomenon is called a "positive distraction" by Joel Dimsdale, MD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego. It can be strong and healthy medication, he claims - a powerful weapon against spending all day long at home and fretting.
