Pessimism and the risk for coronary heart disease among middle-aged and older Finnish men and women: a ten-year follow-up study

Mikko T. Pänkäläinen, Tuomas V. Kerola, Jukka J. Hintikka

Despite the growth in knowledge about coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors, and the advances made in preventing and treating them, the incidence of CHD is still notably quite high. Research has concentrated on the physiological factors that present risks for CHD, but there is an increasing amount of evidence for the connection of mental health, personal traits and CHD. Data on the connection of disposition (optimism or pessimism) and CHD are relatively scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate the long-term connection between optimism, pessimism and the risk for having CHD. This was a ten-year prospective cohort study on a regional sample of three cohorts aged 52-56, 62-66 and 72-76 years at baseline (N = 2815). The study groups were personally interviewed four times (in 2002, 2005, 2008 and 2012). The revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R) was completed at the first appointment to determine the level of dispositional optimism or pessimism. During the ten-year follow-up, the incidence of new cases of coronary heart diseases was measured. The association between dispositional optimism/pessimism and the incidence of CHD during the follow-up was studied with logistic regression. Those who developed coronary heart disease during the ten-year follow-up were significantly more pessimistic at baseline than the other subjects. Using multivariate logistic regression models separately for men and women, we noticed no elevated risk for CHD in the pessimistic women compared to the non-pessimistic women. However, among men in the highest quartile of pessimism, the risk for CHD was approximately four-fold (OR 4.11, 95 % CI 1.68-11.04) that of the men in the lowest quartile. Optimism did not seem to have any role in the risk for developing CHD. Our main finding is that pessimism seemed to be a clear risk factor for coronary heart disease in men even after adjusting for classical well-known risk factors while optimism did not seem to be a protective factor. Connection between pessimism and coronary heart disease was not detectable among women. Similar gender differences between psychosocial factors and overall well-being have been noticed in some earlier studies, too. The mechanism of this gender difference is not fully understood. Differences between men and women in somatic responses to stress found in earlier studies may at least partly explain this phenomenon. The impact of optimism and pessimism on cardiovascular disease has been studied earlier and several possible mechanisms have been discovered but it seems clear that they cannot fully explain the association. For example, optimists have healthier lifestyles which lowers the risk for coronary heart disease, but pessimism was established to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in our study even in logistic regressions including the best known classical risk factors, e.g. smoking and high level of blood glucose. According to our study it is important to pay attention also to the psychosocial components in addition to the well-known risk factors when planning the prevention of coronary heart disease. Measuring pessimism is quite easy and it consumes very little time. Once the amount of pessimism is ascertained, it is easier to define who is in the greatest need of preventive actions concerning coronary heart disease. Pessimism seems to be a substantial risk factor for CHD, and as an easily measured variable it might be a very useful tool together with the well-known physiological risk factors to determine the risk for developing CHD, at least among men.