A smile a day may help keep heart disease away

FDA Consumer, Jan-Feb, 2002

Older men who see life's glass as being half full rather than half empty may be less likely to develop coronary heart disease, a new study indicates.

Researchers ranked a group of more than 1,000 older men based on a scoring system that characterized them along a continuum from pessimist to optimist. They found that each step up the scale toward optimism decreased the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). The men ranked as being most optimistic had a risk of heart disease less than half of that of those ranked the most pessimistic, according to a study published in the November-December 2001 issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

"These ... data are among the first to demonstrate that a more optimistic [perspective], or viewing the glass as half full, lowers the risk of CHD in older men," says lead author Laura D. Kubzansky, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health.

The study is based on data from 1,306 men whose average age at enrollment was just over 60 and who were followed for an average of 10 years.

Despite the protective effect on the development of CHD, the optimistic men were no less likely to die of any cause than were pessimistic men in the study. This may have been related to the fact that all the men, as veterans, had ready access to health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs, reducing their risk of dying from heart disease, according to the study.

The researchers suggest that the protective effects of optimism may be, in part, due to lower stress, which has been shown to decrease heart disease risk. Also, optimists are more likely to engage in health-promoting activities such as exercising and not smoking. However, the researchers note that their findings pertain specifically only to white men and cannot be generalized to women or non-white men.

The study was supported with funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute on Aging.