Aggression Carries its Own Health Risks

As we saw in yesterday’s blog, aggression is a personality trait that can be learnt from your spouse, if you’re unlucky enough to be married to an aggressive person.    This can have consequences, as a joint study from Italy and the USA, reported in the online version of Hypertension, shows. 

While there are several studies showing that antagonism-related traits are linked to increased cardiovascular events, there’s little evidence concerning the intermediate steps, or ‘markers’.  The measurement of carotid artery intima-media thickening by ultrasound is such a marker, being an expression of arterial thickening due to atherosclerosis, the degenerative arterial disease largely responsible for heart attacks and strokes.

Data for the study came from 5,600 people living in 4 villages in Sardinia, Italy; they were taking part in the SardiNIA Study of Aging, which is supported by the US National Institute of Aging (NIA).  Their average age was 42 (ranging from 14 to 94), and 58% were women.  A standard personality test was administered that included a measure of agreeableness, which trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender mindedness.  Arterial thickening was measured by ultrasound of the carotid artery.  The subjects also had screening tests for other cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, triglycerides, and fasting glucose levels.

Those participants who scored low on agreeableness, particularly on the scales for straightforwardness and compliance, had thicker artery walls, both at the start and the end of the 3-year study, and also increased their thickness more during the study than the other subjects.  Overall, men had thicker artery walls than women, but women with antagonistic traits had similar carotid thickening as antagonistic men.  The researchers conclude that antagonistic individuals, especially those who were manipulative and aggressive, had greater increases in arterial thickening.  They believe their findings can probably be generalized from people living in small Italian villages to us all, regardless of where we live.