News & Announcements
Title ‘Why you have a heart attack when you get angry’
Hospital GURO
Date 2021-01-25
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‘Why you have a heart attack when you get angry’

A Team
Led by Professor Jin Won Kim of Cardiovascular Center of Korea University Guro
Hospital,
A team led
by Professor Jin Won Kim of Cardiovascular Center of Korea University Guro
Hospital (Professor Jin Won Kim and Dong Oh Kang of Cardiovascular Center, and
Professor Jae Seon Eo of Department of Nuclear Medicine) investigated an
important link between emotional stress and cardiovascular events with
three-dimensional (3D)-rendered images for the first time in the world.
Emotional
stress is a known major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but the
mechanistic linkage of stress response with cardiovascular events was not fully
elucidated.
The team
used 3D-rendered images to demonstrate a mechanistic link between brain
amygdalar activity that regulates emotional response and arterial
atherosclerotic inflammation which can cause a heart attack. The study found
that brain emotional neural activity increased notably as the severity of
myocardial infarction (MI) increased, and decreased with the recovery of MI
“This is the
first study to demonstrate a relationship between emotion and heart attack,
which was understood only intuitively, using 3D-rendered images for the first
time in the world,” Professor Dong Oh Kang, first author, said. “This suggests
that effective control of emotional stress clinically can be an important
strategy for preventing and treating cardiovascular disease.”
“The
findings of the study are of great academic significance because they present
key clues in understanding the pathophysiological link between emotional stress
and cardiovascular disease,” Professor Jin Won Kim, corresponding author, said.
“By applying 3D-rendered images to existing imaging modality, the interaction
between brain emotional activity and atherosclerotic inflammation can be
understood easily. As it demonstrated that emotional stress is liked with
atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, we plan to propose a new academic
paradigm for brain-cardiovascular disease by developing technology to control
it through follow-up research.”
This article
‘Stress-associated Neurobiological Activity Is Linked with Acute Plaque
Instability via Enhanced Macrophage Activity: A Prospective serial 18F-FDG
PET/CT Imaging Assessment’ was published in the latest issue of European
Heart Journal [2019 JCR Impact Factor 22.678], a world-renown journal in
cardiovascular medicine, attracting attention from academia.
※ Link to Article: https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaa1095/6104029