Stress Can Cause High Cholesterol Levels

How you react to stressful situations is critical. Some people can just blow off a stress-laden state of affairs, others produce a variety of psychosomatic symptoms, a reduction in their immunological status, or develop ulcers, heart disease or other chronic conditions. Now add to the list of stress-responses an increase in serum cholesterol levels.

Over 3 years ago London scientists measured the cardiovascular risk factors in more than 10,000 British government employees. Thy also measured their physiological responses to a moderately stressful task involving color and word matching, and pattern tracing. The measurements included the lipid level response to stress.

Three years later they repeated a whole range of measurements, including fasting blood lipid levels. They found that those people who had a marked response to the mental stress test by increasing their lipid levels had a much greater increase in their fasting lipid levels three years later. In other words, those who showed high cholesterol levels in response to the mental stress test had less favorable lipid profiles 3 years later than those who took the same test but didn’t have the lipid response.

Useful to know, maybe, but what do you do if you’re a ‘stress-responder’? Avoid stress altogether? It’s probably better to make sure you have a healthy lipid profile by adjustments in your lifestyle – diet, exercise, smoking, etc – and by practicing healthy stress management in your job. . .