Hair Shows Chronic Stress and Heart Attack Linked

For the first time, a biological marker shows that chronic stress plays a very important role in heart attacks, and researchers from The University of Western Ontario have found a way to measure it.

It is well known that stressors like job, marriage and financial problems favor the development of cardiovascular disease and can trigger heart attack, but until now, no one had found a biological marker that could measure the level of chronic stress.

Doctors Gideon Koren and Stan Van Uum came up with a way of measuring the cortisol levels in hair, thus determining the stress levels within several months before the heart attack.

“Intuitively we know stress is not good for you, but it's not easy to measure,” says Dr. Koren, who holds the Ivey Chair in Molecular Toxicology at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

Cortisol is a stress hormone whose secretion within the body rises during stress periods.

It can be measured in serum, saliva and urine, but this is only a way of measuring stress at the time of the analysis.

But cortisol can also be found in the hair shaft, so for the research, hair samples were collected from 56 male adults who had suffered heart attacks and were admitted to the Meir Medical Centre in Kfar-Saba, Israel.

Another group of 56 male patients, hospitalized for other reasons than heart attack, also had hair samples collected, as a control group.

“We know that on average, hair grows one centimeter a month, and so if we take a hair sample six cm long, we can determine stress levels for six months by measuring the cortisol level in the hair,” explained Dr Koren.

After analysis, higher levels of cortisol were found in the hair samples of heart attack patients, over the three months preceding the cardiovascular accident, compared to the control group.

Hypertension, diabetes, smoking and family history of coronary artery disease did not make a significant difference between the two groups, except for the fact that the heart attack group had a higher level of cholesterol.

Dr Korn added that “stress is a serious part of modern life affecting many areas of health and life.

“This study has implications for research and for practice, as stress can be managed with lifestyle changes and psychotherapy.”

The study concluded that hair cortisol is a viable predictor of heart attack and researchers published their findings in the Journal Stress.