Happiness no cure - study

Thursday December 10th, 2015

Being unhappy and stressed does not increase the risk of developing life-threatening illnesses, a senior medical researcher says today.

According to a report in The Lancet, the link between stress and ill-health reported by many studies over the years has come from confusion between cause and effect.

Researchers say that unhappiness is strongly linked to ill-health and factors such as lack of fitness, deprivation and smoking habits.

The findings come from an analysis of the health records of 700,000 British women taking part in the Million Women Study conducted by one of the world's most eminent medical statisticians.

The women had an average age of 59 at the start of the study and were tracked for ten years. Some 30,000 died during this period.

Researcher Professor Richard Peto, of Oxford University, UK, said: "Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect.

"Of course people who are ill tend to be unhappier than those who are well, but the UK Million Women Study shows that happiness and unhappiness do not themselves have any direct effect on death rates."

Fellow researcher Dr Bette Liu, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said today: "We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a ten-year study of a million women.

"Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn't make you ill."

Writing in the journal two French experts suggest randomised control trials to test the link more closely.

Dr Philipe de Souto Barreto and Professor Yves Rolland, of the Institute of Ageing, University Hospital of Toulouse, France say: "Such studies should be powered to allow comparisons to be made across age ranges and between men and women. Cross-cultural studies could also shed light on the generalisability of interventions to promote happiness."

Lancet 10 December 2015 [abstract]

Tags: General Health | Mental Health | UK News | Women's Health & Gynaecology

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