Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Men With Poor Emotional Control: A Prospective Study.

Objective: Many psychosocial factors have been associated with coronary heart disease (CHD), including hostility, anger, and depression. We tested the hypothesis that these factors may have their basis in emotion regulation abilities. Our aim was to determine whether poor emotional control predicted long-term risk of CHD.

Methods: This Swedish national study includes 46,393 men who were conscripted for military service in 1969 and 1970. The men were aged 18 to 20 years at the time of conscription. Psychologists used a brief semistructured interview to retrospectively assess the conscripts' level of emotional control in childhood and adolescence. The outcome measure was a first fatal or nonfatal event of CHD. We calculated hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for poor and adequate versus good emotional control.

Results: After 38 years of follow-up (1971-2009), 2456 incident cases of CHD had occurred. Poor emotional control increased the risk of CHD (HR = 1.31, 95% CI = 1.18-1.45), adjusting for childhood socioeconomic position, anxiety, depression, and parental history of CHD. Further adjustment for life-style-related factors, for example, smoking and body mass index, attenuated the HR to 1.08 (95% CI = 0.97-1.21). In stratified analyses, the fully adjusted association between poor emotional control with CHD remained significantly elevated among men with a parental history of CHD (HR = 1.49, 95% CI = 1.11-2.01, p interaction = .037).

Conclusions: In the overall study population, poor emotional control had no direct effect on CHD beyond life-style-related factors. However, in men with a parental history of CHD, poor emotional control in adolescence remained significantly predictive of long-term CHD risk even when adjusting for life-style-related factors.