Psychological stress and myocardial perfusion in coronary disease patients and healthy controls

This study examined the effect of two different psychological stressors on regional cardiac perfusion in six men with coronary heart disease (CHD) and nine healthy controls. Subjects recalled an anger experience and an anger plus helpless (i.e., Desperation Recall Task) experience during positron emission tomography (PET). Emotional reactivity, blood pressure, and heart rate were also assessed. Experimental manipulations generated significant emotional and cardiovascular reactivity. Cardiac perfusion to diseased myocardial segments failed to show any significant differences between CHD patients' diseased segments and controls' healthy segments for the Anger Recall task or the Desperation Recall Task. Results failed to confirm previous findings of coronary artery constriction while reliving an angry experience, yet are consistent with other studies utilizing mental arithmetic. Vasoactive medication use, sample size, and perfusion variability may have contributed to these findings.