A stressful, high-octane lifestyle is probably one of the worst things you can do for your heart, and cardiologists now have a better understanding of why.
In a large-scale longitudinal study, published last Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet, a team of cardiologists at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital found that stress increases heart attack risk by way of an overactive amygdala in the brain.
The new study shows, for the first time, how an overactive amygdala can cause heart attack and stroke. When stress triggers the amygdala, it activates bone marrow and inflammation of the arteries to create the conditions for a heart attack.
