The correlation between everyday stress and angina pectoris: a longitudinal study.
The article describes a longitudinal study testing the hypothesis that everyday stress can aggravate angina pectoris (AP). Every weekend for 1 year, 42 patients with coronary heart disease filled out a questionnaire on perceived stress for the preceding week. They also rated AP symptoms, again for the previous week. Within-subject correlation between stress and severity of AP was quite pronounced in some subjects and resulted in a sample mean of 0.38. The distribution of correlation coefficients in the sample was significantly different from a random distribution around 0. Stress values also predicted AP in the week to come. However, this finding was no longer significant when the influence of lag 1 auto-correlations between stress values was eliminated. Our results show that the effect of everyday stress on AP is essentially immediate and that it can be quite important in some subjects.
Verthein
U
U
Institute of Psychology III, University of Hamburg, Germany.
Köhler
T
T
D000368:Aged; D000787:Angina Pectoris / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D015897:Comorbidity; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D008016:Life Change Events; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011336:Probability; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires