Associations of stressful life events and social strain with incident cardiovascular disease in the Women's Health Initiative.

Background: Epidemiologic studies have yielded mixed findings on the association of psychosocial stressors with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. In this study, we examined associations of stressful life events (SLE) and social strain with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke (overall, and for hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes) independent of sociodemographic characteristics, and we evaluated whether these relationships were explained by traditional behavioral and biological risk factors.

Methods And Results: Data from approximately 82 000 Women's Health Initiative Observational Study participants were used for the SLE and social strain analyses, respectively.