A new study shows that anxiety in midlife is associated with factors that increase risk for developing heart disease and diabetes in later life.
Among healthy middle-aged men who did not have heart disease or diabetes (cardiometabolic disease), those who had anxiety were more likely to have risk factors that are associated with higher cardiometabolic disease risk as they grew older.
The study led by Lewina Lee, PhD, was published in January in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
In this study, researchers used questionnaires that asked the men about two aspects of anxiety, namely neuroticism and excess worry.
Neuroticism is a tendency to perceive experiences as threatening, to feel that challenges are uncontrollable, and experience frequent and disproportionately intense negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety, sadness, and anger, across many situations, the researchers explain.
Worry, on the other hand, can be healthy and lead to constructive solutions, they note, but it also may be unhealthy, especially when it becomes uncontrollable and interferes with day-to-day functioning.
“Our finding suggest that anxiety is linked to unhealthy biological processes that pave the way to developing heart disease and diabetes in men,” Lee, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine, said.
