Posted on: Thursday, December 27, 2001
Fear can kill people with heart disease, study finds
By Kathleen Fackelmann
USA Today
A character in the novel "The Hound of the Baskervilles" suffers a fatal heart attack brought on by fear. A new scientific study suggests that the fictional episode is possible: People with heart disease can be frightened to death.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story, legend has it that a supernatural hound will kill the head of the Baskerville family. A greedy relative who wants Sir Charles Baskerville dead to claim the family inheritance finds a large dog and gets it to howl each night. Baskerville, who has a weak heart, believes the dog is the hound from hell and he dies of a heart attack.
David Phillips, a University of California-San Diego sociologist, used superstition to test the theory that fear could trigger a heart attack. In Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese, the words for the number 4 and death are pronounced almost identically. In China and Japan, 4 is left out of phone numbers and elevators because it evokes such fear. Phillips says that, in the United States, many people of Chinese and Japanese descent feel the same anxiety, especially, say doctors, if they are ill when the fourth day of the month arrives.
The team turned to U.S. death certificates, looking at the computerized records for more than 200,000 people of Chinese and Japanese descent and more than 47 million white Americans who had died between 1973 and 1998.
When the team homed in on heart disease patients, they found a surge of heart attack deaths, 13 percent, among people of Chinese and Japanese descent on the fourth day of the month. In California, where large populations of Chinese and Japanese have settled, the effect was even bigger, a 27 percent jump. Death certificates for white Americans showed no such jump.
The study, which appears in the British Medical Journal, was not designed to find out why those deaths occurred. Yet Phillips wonders if the surge in deaths can be attributed to "the Baskerville effect." He says that apprehension may trigger changes in the body, such as a spike in blood pressure or irregular heartbeats, which can lead to a heart attack.
