Stress Can Cause Rising Cholesterol Levels -

Stress Can Cause Rising Cholesterol Levels - CME Teaching Brief - MedPage Today: "Stress Can Cause Rising Cholesterol Levels

By Neil Osterweil, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
November 23, 2005
Also covered by: BBC News
MedPage Today Action Points

Understand that in this study, participants who initially responded with high levels of stress to a psychological challenge test had the highest levels of cholesterol three years later.

Review
LONDON, Nov. 23 - Stress can cause cholesterol levels to climb, researchers here have found.
A study of 199 men and women here found that 'a person's reaction to stress is one mechanism through which higher lipid levels may develop,' said epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe, D.Sc., of University College London.
He and colleague Lena Brydon, Ph.D., reported in the November issue of Health Psychology that people who showed high levels of stress responses on a test designed to evoke them had more unfavorable lipid profiles three years later than did people who took the same test but managed it without stressful responses.
The participants were 199 men and women who were part of the Whitehall II study. Three years earlier it assessed demographic, psychosocial, and biological risk factors for coronary artery disease in more than 10,000 British civil servants.
The investigators measured cardiovascular, inflammatory, and hemostatic responses as participants performed moderately stressful behavioral tasks involving color and word matching on a computer screen, and tracing an image seen in a mirror.
They were evaluated for stress-induced changes in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol concentration, HDL /.../"