Study: Being happy might help your heart

February 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

LONDON (AP) — You’ve heard it before: to avoid a heart attack, don’t smoke, eat right and exercise. But it also may help to be happy, a new study says.

Even if you’re grumpy by nature, just try to be cheerful.

Researchers at Columbia University rated the happiness levels of more than 1,700 adults in Canada with no heart problems in 1995.

After a decade, they examined the 145 people who developed a heart problem and found happier people were less likely to have had one.

The study was published online today in the European Heart Journal.

“If you aren’t naturally a happy person, just try acting like one,” said Dr. Karina Davidson of Columbia University Medical Center, the paper’s lead author. “It could help your heart.”

Davidson and colleagues used a five-point scale to measure people’s happiness. They then statistically adjusted to account for things such as age, gender and smoking.

For every point on the happiness scale, people were 22 percent less likely to have a heart problem. The study was paid for by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and others.

Davidson said happy people were more likely to have a healthier lifestyle.

It also could be there is an undiscovered genetic trait that predisposes people to be happy and have less heart disease.

Other experts said happiness itself could result in a healthier heart compared with other emotions such as stress or depression.

Stress often releases hormones that can damage heart muscle. Stress also can cause blood vessels to open too wide, allowing plaque buildups to break off and clog the arteries, according to Joep Perk, a professor of health sciences at Sweden’s Kalmar University and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology. Perk was not linked to the study.