Anger leaves men susceptible to accidents and injury

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

Men who get irritable may find their risk of injury increased, according to a new study.
Anger can be bad for your health. That's the message from a new study by researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia. They interviewed people who had been injured and asked them to describe the emotions they were experiencing both in the 24 hours before the injury and at the moment when the injury actually occurred.

Patients used different terms such as excited, alert, irritable, angry and hostile to describe these emotions. The researchers found that greater degrees of anger were linked to greater risk of injury. Those who described themselves as feeling irritable have a 30 per cent increased risk of injury and those who are hostile double their risk of injury. The link was not, surprisingly perhaps, found for traffic accidents, but it was for sports injury and assault. Women did not seem to suffer from this increased risk when they were angry. The team suggests that doctors treating injured patients could ask them about their feelings and maybe introduce them to anger management if this is an issue.

Source
Annals of Family Medicine January/February 2006

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