Psychological Stress Raises Risk of Death

Major life events — such as death of a spouse or a putting a parent into a retirement home — and the subsequent stress trajectories may dramatically shorten a person’s lifespan. Carolyn Aldwin, from Oregon State University (Oregon, USA), and colleagues analyzed data collected on 1,000 middle-class and working-class men over an 18-year period. All the men in the study were picked because they had good health when they first signed up to be part of the Boston VA Normative Aging Study in the 1960s. The team observed that those in the low-stress group experienced an average of two or fewer major life events in a year, as compared with an average of three for the moderate group and up to six for the high stress group. The researchers found that those men who experience persistently moderate or high levels of stressful life events over a number of years have a 50% higher mortality rate