THE CORRELATION BETWEEN EVERYDAY STRESS AND ANGINA-PECTORIS - A LONGITUDINAL-STUDY

The article describes a longitudinal study testing the hypothesis that everyday stress can aggravate angina pectoris (AP). Every weekend for 1 year, 42 patients with coronary heart disease filled out a question naire on perceived stress for the preceding week. They also rated AP s ymptoms, again for the previous week. Within-subject correlation betwe en stress and severity of AP was quite pronounced in some subjects and resulted in a sample mean of 0.38. The distribution of correlation co efficients in the sample was significantly different from a random dis tribution around 0. Stress values also predicted AP in the week to com e. However, this finding was no longer significant when the influence of lag 1 autocorrelations between stress values was eliminated. Our re sults show that the effect of everyday stress on AP is essentially imm ediate and that it can be quite important in some subjects. (C) 1997 E lsevier Science Inc.