Objective-To review the recent (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)) literature on psychosocial risk and protective factors for coronary heart disease (CHD) among women, including negative emotions, stress, social relationships, and positive psychological factors.Methods-Articles for the review were identified using PubMed and bibliographies of relevant articles. Eligible studies included at least 100 women and either focused on (a) exclusively female participants or (b) both men and women, conducting either gender-stratified analyses or examining interactions with gender. Sixty-seven published reports were identified that examined prospective associations with incident or recurrent CHD.Results-In general, evidence suggests that depression, anxiety disorders, anger suppression, and stress associated with relationships or family responsibilities are associated with elevated CHD risk among women, that supportive social relationships and positive psychological factors may be associated with reduced risk, and that general anxiety, hostility, and work-related stress are less consistently associated with CHD among women relative to men.Conclusions-A growing literature supports the significance of psychosocial factors for the development of CHD among women. Consideration of both traditional psychosocial factors (e.g., depression) and factors that may be especially important for women (e.g., stress associated with responsibilities at home or multiple roles) may improve identification of women at elevated risk as well as the development of effective psychological interventions for women with or at risk for CHD. Keywordscoronary heart disease; women's health; depression; hostility; psychological stress; social support Over the past decade, a number of reviews have summarized the growing literature on psychosocial risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD), which include negative emotional states, psychological stress, and lack of supportive social relationships (1,2,3,4). Although these important reviews note some differences in risk factors for men and women, they do not evaluate the results systematically by gender. The goal of this review is to summarize the results of studies that examine the relationship between psychosocial risk factors and CHD for women specifically.Address correspondence to Carissa A. Low, PhD, 3811 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Telephone: (412) 648-7160. lowca@upmc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptPsychosom Med. Author manuscrip...
A randomized trial (n = 60; A. L. Stanton, S. Danoff-Burg, L. A. Sworowski, et al., 2002) revealed that 4 sessions of written expressive disclosure or benefit finding produced lower physical symptom reports and medical appointments for cancer-related morbidities at 3-month follow-up among breast cancer patients relative to a fact-control condition. The goal of this article is to investigate mechanisms underlying these effects. Within-session heart rate habituation mediated effects of expressive disclosure on physical symptoms, and greater use of negative emotion words in essays predicted a decline in physical symptoms. Postwriting mood and use of positive emotion and cognitive mechanism words in essays were not significant mediators, although greater cognitive mechanism word use was related to greater heart rate habituation and negative emotion word use.
Researchers have increasingly begun to use consumer wearables or wrist-worn smartwatches and fitness monitors for measurement of cardiovascular psychophysiological processes related to mental and physical health outcomes. These devices have strong appeal because they allow for continuous, scalable, unobtrusive, and ecologically valid data collection of cardiac activity in “big data” studies. However, replicability and reproducibility may be hampered moving forward due to the lack of standardization of data collection and processing procedures, and inconsistent reporting of technological factors (e.g., device type, firmware versions, and sampling rate), biobehavioral variables (e.g., body mass index, wrist dominance and circumference), and participant demographic characteristics, such as skin tone, that may influence heart rate measurement. These limitations introduce unnecessary noise into measurement, which can cloud interpretation and generalizability of findings. This paper provides a brief overview of research using commercial wearable devices to measure heart rate, reviews literature on device accuracy, and outlines the challenges that non-standardized reporting pose for the field. We also discuss study design, technological, biobehavioral, and demographic factors that can impact the accuracy of the passive sensing of heart rate measurements, and provide guidelines and corresponding checklist handouts for future study data collection and design, data cleaning and processing, analysis, and reporting that may help ameliorate some of these barriers and inconsistencies in the literature.
Objective To test the effects of emotionally expressive writing in a randomized controlled trial of metastatic breast cancer patients and to determine whether effects of the intervention varied as a function of perceived social support or time since metastatic diagnosis. Design Women (N = 62) living with Stage IV breast cancer were randomly assigned to write about cancer-related emotions (EMO; n = 31) or the facts of their diagnosis and treatment (CTL; n = 31). Participants wrote at home for four 20-min sessions within a 3-week interval. Main Outcome Measures Depressive symptoms, cancer-related intrusive thoughts, somatic symptoms, and sleep quality at 3 months postintervention. Results No significant main effects of experimental condition were observed. A significant condition × social support interaction emerged on intrusive thoughts; EMO writing was associated with reduced intrusive thoughts for women reporting low emotional support (η2 = .15). Significant condition × time since metastatic diagnosis interactions were also observed for somatic symptoms and sleep disturbances. Relative to CTL, EMO participants who were more recently diagnosed had fewer somatic symptoms (η2 = .10), whereas EMO participants with longer diagnosis duration exhibited increases in sleep disturbances (η2 = .09). Conclusion Although there was no main effect of expressive writing on health among the current metastatic breast cancer sample, expressive writing may be beneficial for a subset of metastatic patients (including women with low levels of emotional support or who have been recently diagnosed) and contraindicated for others (i.e., those who have been living with the diagnosis for years).
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