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Stress and Aging
Can Stress Raise Your Blood Pressure? What 50+ Readers Should Know
The spike is real. The long-term link is less settled than you’ve heard. Here’s what the evidence says and what helps.
Election week brings two heart studies back into the news. Katelyn Jetelina covered them at Your Local Epidemiologist on November 3, and they deserve a good look. The first followed 2,436 people with implanted cardiac devices in North Carolina and found arrhythmias were 77 percent more common in the election period than in a comparison period earlier that year (incidence rate ratio 1.77, 95% confidence interval 1.42 to 2.21). The second, from Kaiser Permanente Southern California, found heart attack and stroke hospitalizations in the two days after the 2016 election ran at 1.62 times the rate of the same two days the week before.
Both sets of authors wrote that stress “may” explain the increase. Neither study proved it. The first covers people who already have cardiac devices, and the second covers a two-day window. I bring them up because they raise a bigger question many people over 50 are asking: what does stress do to blood pressure, and how much do we actually know?
