EDITORIAL
Anger and lung function
Anger, stress, dysregulation produces wear and tear on the lung
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr P Lehrer
Department of Psychiatry, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA; lehrer@umdnj.edu
A link between chronic anger and age related deterioration in pulmonary function
Keywords: psychological factors; hostility; anger; pulmonary function; risk factor
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The relationship between psychological and physical states has been known to medicine since the time of the ancient Greeks.1 Although at one time patients with diseases of unknown origin (such as tuberculosis in the 19th century) were labelled as suffering from a psychological or moral malady, this error (and often injustice) does not negate truths about the mind/body relationship in disease. Indeed, scientific interest in and speculation even about mind/body effects on tuberculosis remains high.2
In this issue of Thorax, Kubzansky et al3 have published an important paper on the relationship between decline in lung function in older men and the emotional characteristic of anger. This coincides with a considerable literature on the relationship between anger and cardiovascular disease.4 As the "fight" component in the fight-flight reflex, the psychophysiology of anger overlaps with that of stress. Stress related factors are known to depress immune function5
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- Citation Map
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
