Too much energy spent combating stress linked to earlier death in men

The amount of effort expended by older men in coping with stressful events has the greatest impact on their mortality risk over and above how stressful an event is — or the coping strategy employed to deal with it, new U.S. research published Tuesday indicates.

Through comparing stress and coping self-assessments of 743 men enrolled in the landmark Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study between 1993 to 2002 with deaths through 2020, the Boston University and Avedisian School of Medicine study found total coping effort was associated with 14 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality, BU said in a news release.

The finding of the study, published in The Journals of Gerontology, was independent of problem stressfulness, demographics and health conditions. A benefit-cost ratio — coping efficacy to total coping effort that the researchers define as “coping efficiency” — was not associated with shorter lifespan in adjusted models.

The men studied had an average age 68.4 years, mostly with some college education, and 87 percent were married. Over 16 years, eight months of follow-up, 473, or 64 percent, of the men died. Participants assessed to have expended the least effort to deal with stress were older than those with medium and high effort and had fewer chronic health conditions.

Most coping strategies were weakly to moderately positively correlated, and adaptive coping strategies were employed more frequently than dysfunctional responses, such as avoidance or confrontation.

Of these, only social coping, reaching out to others, was significantly associated with mortality risk with a 15 percent higher risk of dying from all causes.