HEALTH: You actually can worry yourself sick: study

Don’t give yourself a heart attack, worrywarts.

People with health anxiety were much more likely to develop heart disease than those with peace of mind in a new study published in BMJ Open.

That’s not to say being concerned about your health and checking with your doctor is a bad thing. But in this case, researchers analyzed patients suffering from health anxiety, or hypochondria. These subjects are obsessed about getting a serious disease or illness. So they either misdiagnose themselves and seek constant medical attention, or they completely avoid health care or TV medical programs to keep their fear in check.

Doctors also refer to this severe anxiety as the “worry well.” And because studies have shown anxiety to be a risk factor for heart disease, they decided to study just how deep the worry well’s impact on health can be. If anything, they thought hypochondriacs might have better health outcomes, because their hypervigilance would catch any medical issues as they came up.

But it turns out that their fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scientists monitored more than 7,000 patients over 12 years, and found those with health anxiety at the beginning of the study were 73% more likely to develop heart disease than those who didn’t stress. The greater their reported state of anxiety, the greater their risk of heart disease.

Worse, the death rate of the worriers to heart disease was twice as high (just over 6%) as those who were less obsessed.

That puts physicians in a bind, since telling patients that worrying about getting sick can get them sick will probably just make them worry more — which, in turn, can make them sick.

“These findings illustrate the dilemma for clinicians between reassuring the patient that current physical symptoms of anxiety do not represent heart disease, contrasted against the emerging knowledge on how anxiety, over time, may be causally associated with increased risk,” wrote the authors of the study. The findings “underline the importance of proper diagnosis and treatment of health anxiety.”

The bottom line: You can worry yourself sick. Speak to your doctor if health anxiety is stressing you out.