Stressful Life Events: Their Relationships with Coronary Heart Disease.

摘要

Exposure to stress is common and potentially dangerous. Stressful life events have been found by researchers to be related to various illnesses including coronary heart disease. The cost associated to coronary heart disease in the United States was estimated in 1976 by the American Heart Association to be $26.7 billion per year. The faculty of the Air Force Institute of Technology developed a Life Events Survey (LES) and administered it to a convenience sample of stress seminar participants to examine the relationships of individual and organizational variables with coronary heart disease. The LES data included values assigned by the participants to variables associated with 83 stressful life events (SLE). Demographic data and blood samples were also collected from the samples LES participants. Statistical analyses were performed with this data in an effort to determine the correlation (and not the causality) of SLE variables with three physiological predictors of potential for coronary heart disease (cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol) and a measure of physiological stress (CORTISOL). The most significant finding of this cross-sectional study was the persistent significance of relationships between SLE variables and cortisol. (Author)