美国研究人员于本周一称，对某些“脆弱”的人来说，愤怒以其它强烈的情绪会触发可能致命的心律失常。

此前的研究表明，地震、战争甚至输掉一场世界杯足球赛都会增加心源性猝死的几率。心源性猝死是一种由心脏突然停止供血而引发的死亡。

位于美国康涅狄格州纽哈芬市的耶鲁大学的雷切尔?朗佩特博士说：“各种证据表明，当某一人群所受压力较大时，该群体的猝死率会上升。”她的这项研究成果在《美国心脏病学会》期刊上发表。

Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, US researchers said on Monday.

Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood.

"It's definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

"Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart," Lampert said.

She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal heart beat.

"These were people we know already had some vulnerability to arrhythmia," Lampert said in a telephone interview.

Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert's team did a test called T-Wave Alternans that measures electrical instability in the heart.

Lampert said the team specifically asked questions to get people to relive the angry episode. "We found in the lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical instability in these patients," she said.

Next, they followed patients for three years to see which patients later had a cardiac arrest and needed a shock from their implantable defibrillator.

"The people who had the highest anger-induced electrical instability were 10 times more likely than everyone else to have an arrhythmia in follow-up," she said.

Lampert said the study suggests that anger can be deadly, at least for people who are already vulnerable to this type of electrical disturbance in the heart.

"It says yes, anger really does impact the heart's electrical system in very specific ways that can lead to sudden death," she said.