PERSONALITY CLASH

HOW your personality affects your disease risk. This week: Angry ‘CALM down, you’ll give yourself a heart attack!’ is common folk wisdom — and research suggests there is a basis for it.

A 2014 study of 75 otherwise healthy people who had heart scans found those who reported feeling angry most often had the highest level of fatty plaques in their arteries, reports the Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Plaques can break away and cause lethal clots. The theory is chronic levels of stress hormones cause inflammation that encourages plaques to form.

Scientists thought ‘Type A’ personalities — often highachieving executive types — were more prone to heart attacks as a result of anger.

But this was discredited, as early studies focused on mainly hard-drinking, sedentary male executives in the Seventies and Eighties, says Professor Andrew Steptoe, head of the behavioural science and health research department at University College London.