The Stress/Heart Disease Relationship

"...It's not simply that people tend to be depressed because they have a life-threatening illness, or that depressed people smoke, are too lethargic to take their medicine, or aren't motivate to eat right or exercise. "Even when we take those factors into consideration," says Dwight Evans, the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, "depression jumps out as an independent risk factor for heart disease. It may be as bad as cholesterol..."

DID YOU KNOW: Clinical Depression may affect 20 million individuals in the U.S.

Updated: See our follow up post "The Power of Mood" for a continuation on this article. For more posts on related categories click on the tags at the top of the article.