It’s natural to worry about your health sometimes. When you get sick, it’s easy to jump to catastrophic scenarios—that you’re dying of cancer when you have the flu, or that a tremor in your hand is the beginning of Parkinson’s disease.
However, for some people, this kind of worry is frequent and becomes incapacitating. Psychiatrists call this “health anxiety, ” although this stress is commonly known as hypochondria. As much as 1-2% of the population suffers from hypochondria. And while you might think that worrying about your health would make you healthier, the Norwegian Hordaland Health Study, a long-term research project from the University of Bergen and the National Health Screening Service, suggests that hypochondria can have the opposite effect.
The Research
Using 13 years of previously-collected research across 7052 participants, the researchers measured the participants’ levels of anxiety about their health. Their findings were that 3.3% of those studied had a heart attack or acute angina, with twice as many people with health anxiety than without.
The researchers discovered that those with high levels of health anxiety were 70% likelier to develop some form of heart disease. Therefore, hypochondria was a risk factor for coronary heart disease.
The Connection Between Hypochondria and Heart Disease
What the study couldn’t measure, however, was causality. It couldn’t tell us why health anxiety and heart disease are linked. It’s possible that hypochondriacs sense some of the symptoms that lead to heart disease, or that the hypochondriacs’ stress triggers the development of heart disease.
"Stress causes us to secrete cortisol, a hormone which in the short term energizes us, but in the long term, in high doses, can have corrosive effects on various organs in the body and increase, for example, atherosclerosis, which is a risk factor for heart disease," explained Ian Robertson, author of the forthcoming book The Stress Test: How Pressure Can Make You Stronger and Sharper. It can be difficult for hypochondriacs to avoid this stress and they may secrete extraneous levels of cortisol.
Conclusion
While this study doesn’t control for all factors, it’s an important beginning into understanding what kind of effects hypochondria may have on health. By handling this condition through therapeutic means, it may be possible to reduce the effects hypochondria has on cardiac health. Through additional research and controlling for additional factors, researchers may be able to flesh out further the relationship between hypochondria and health risks, enabling doctors to develop ways to minimize the effects.
