Researchers found that people with high levels of pessimism to have a higher risk of coronary heart disease (CHD)-induced mortality. Optimism and pessimism focus on people's attitude towards their future - whether or not they generally expect a greater number of desirable or undesirable things to happen. Dr. Mikko Pänkäläinen, lead author of the study said: "High levels of pessimism have previously been linked to factors that affect cardiac health, such as inflammation, but data on the connection between risk of death from CHD and optimism and pessimism as personality traits are relatively scarce."
Dr. Pänkäläinen added: "Levels of pessimism can be measured quite easily and pessimism might be a very useful tool together with other known risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension or smoking to determine the risk of CHD-induced mortality."
This is the first study to examine CHD mortality and its association with optimism and pessimism as independent variables. Previous research that treated optimism and pessimism as opposites on a continuous scale rendered conflicting results, particularly regarding associations between optimism and CHD-related deaths.
The researchers found that the 121 men and women who died from CHD during the study's 11-year follow-up period had been more pessimistic at baseline than people who were still alive at follow-up. However, there was no difference between the groups in optimism, suggesting that pessimism alone mediates the effect on CHD mortality. Comparing the highest and lowest quartiles of pessimism, people in the highest quartile had a 2.2-fold higher risk of dying from CHD than those in the lowest quartile.
Observational studies like this one can show possible links between risk of death from CHD and pessimism, but they cannot show cause and effect because other factors may play a role. While this prospective cohort study investigated a randomly selected group of people with even numbers of both sexes and representatives of all invited age groups across a long follow-up period, it may be limited by its use of self-reported data which may have caused inconsistencies between people's answers and the reality of some physiological risk factors such as smoking habits or use of medications.
