Evolutionary medicine perspective on coping style and health outcomes: an exploratory study.

One of the issues within the framework of Darwinian medicine is why individuals develop the specific disease they do. Ethologists have long known that within any given population, there are organisms with the tendency towards higher () or lower () aggressiveness, and since the physiological responses to stressful events are different in and it has been suggested that these strategies might be related to health outcomes. The aims of this exploratory study were to determine whether an analogues of and as basic coping strategies could be defined among chronically ill patients and healthy controls and whether the proportion of and differs among different groups of patients. Patients from several clinical departments (dermatology, gastroenterology and psychiatry) and a comparable group of healthy participants were recruited ( = 288). Based on their coping style and anxiety trait, they were categorized as either (low anxiety trait and problem-oriented coping style) or (high anxiety trait and avoidant coping style). We found a significantly larger proportion of among patients with gastroenterological and dermatologic symptoms, and significantly more among psychiatric patients. The proportion of and in healthy controls was close to 50:50. This is in accordance with the notion that and have different allostatic load management, and that the onset of certain diseases might be related to these strategies. However, prospective longitudinal studies are necessary to reach definite conclusions regarding the susceptibility to certain diseases among people with different stress-related behavioral and emotional strategies.