A British study says that stress becomes the cause of boosting heart-damaging behaviors in people and thus increases their risk of cardiovascular events.

Mark Hamer, one of the lead authors of the study, says: “We have found that people suffering from stress had a 50% higher risk of a heart attack and other cardiovascular diseases during the follow up period.”

In their study, the researchers followed those 6,576 people who were the part of a Scottish Health Study. The participants were provided a questionnaire that was designed to find out their life condition and general happiness with things like depression or stress symptoms and sleep disorder. The researchers classified nearly 15% people as patient with psychosocial stress.

Besides that they also got physical data that consisted of basic information like height, weight, smoking, blood cholesterol levels, physical activity, C-reactive protein and alcohol intake.

The researchers found in a 7 year follow-up that in patients with psychosocial stress the occurrences of cardiovascular event, like stroke, heart attacks and bypass surgery, were nearly 50% higher.

Different conditions like physical inactivity, high blood pressure, excessive alcohol intake, smoking and obesity were also found related to psychosocial stress.