Originally published December 18 2005
Cholesterol study reveals new information about the physiological consequences of mental stress
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
UK researcher Dr. Andrew Steptoe talks about a study he co-authored, which assesses the impact of daily stress levels on the cholesterol content in people's blood.
Researchers in the UK found that healthy middle-age adults whose cholesterol rose in response to a stressful task were more likely than their peers without this increase to have high cholesterol several years later.
It's been known that blood cholesterol can show a short-lived rise in response to stress, study co-author Dr. Andrew Steptoe told Reuters Health.
The new findings, he said, suggest that these transient increases may predict long-term elevations in cholesterol.
A number of studies have linked chronic stress to a higher risk of heart disease, and it's possible that stress-related changes in cholesterol contribute to this, according to Steptoe, who is based at University College London.
Steptoe and colleague Lena Brydon report the findings in the journal Health Psychology.
To see if stress-related spikes in cholesterol can have long-range effects, the researchers followed 199 middle-aged adults over 3 years.
At the start of the study, participants performed two moderately stressful computer-based tasks; blood samples were taken before and after the tests to measure any changes in cholesterol levels.
Overall, 56 percent had a total cholesterol level that surpassed the cutoff for diagnosing high cholesterol, compared with only 16 percent of the group whose cholesterol levels had been least affected by stress.
Even when the researchers weighed other factors such as age, body weight and smoking, the group with the highest stress response was 13 times more likely than the group with the lowest response to have high cholesterol 3 years later.
They were also four times more likely to have high levels of LDL cholesterol, the "bad" form that contributes to artery-clogging plaques.
The findings suggest that chronic stress can contribute to high cholesterol in some people, though the reason is unclear, according to Steptoe and Brydon.
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