High blood pressure isn’t just a warning sign for heart diseases; it might also be tied to our emotions and personality.
Particularly, scientists are looking at how our feelings, like anxiety and sadness, or traits like neuroticism, might be connected. Neuroticism means you often feel negative emotions like worry or sadness.
In a fresh look at this topic, researchers have found something interesting about the lower number in a blood pressure reading, the diastolic pressure. They believe it might actually influence neurotic personality traits.
More importantly, keeping this number in check could help reduce not just neurotic behaviors but also anxiety and heart-related diseases.
So how did they find this out? They used a method called Mendelian randomization. This approach is like using your genes as clues to figure out how certain health issues are connected.
Our genes can influence our blood pressure, and scientists can identify over 1,000 tiny variations in our DNA, called SNPs, that are linked to blood pressure.
The team used information from eight big databases with DNA information from people, mostly of European descent.
They were looking for any connections between high blood pressure, specifically the diastolic number, and personality traits like neuroticism.
Their discovery was quite specific: High blood pressure and especially the diastolic number seem to have a strong effect on neuroticism. But they didn’t find the same strong link with anxiety or feelings of depression and happiness.
Diving deeper, they found that over 90% of this connection was due to diastolic blood pressure, based on the analysis of 1,074 SNPs.
This research suggests there’s a link between the heart and the brain that could affect personality. People with neuroticism often feel easily upset or stressed, are hard on themselves, and can get anxious or angry quickly.
Since neuroticism can lead to anxiety and mood disorders, it’s a big deal. People with these traits often face a lot of mental stress, which can then lead to high blood pressure and heart diseases.
What this all means is that watching and managing blood pressure isn’t just good for your heart; it might also help keep certain personality traits and mood disorders in check.
If blood pressure interests you, there’s more to explore. Other studies suggest different causes of high blood pressure and question the accuracy of common ways to measure it.
There’s also research on how things like black tea might help manage blood pressure and how certain blood pressure medications could affect heart health.
The study, which adds a new layer to our understanding of blood pressure, was carried out by Cai L and colleagues and published in the journal General Psychiatry.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about how diets could help lower high blood pressure, and 3 grams of omega-3s a day keep high blood pressure at bay.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies that beetroot juice could help reduce blood pressure, and results showing cinnamon could help lower high blood pressure.
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