FACTORS AFFECTING HEALTH

BEHAVIOUR
BY
Dr.Abdul Rahiman
PG-I
Under guidance of Dr.Channabasava reddy
 Specific learning objectives
• At the end of the session learner shall be able
to
• Psychosocial factors can influence the course of chronic
human disease along several pathways.
• Behaviour that has perceived short-term benefits, such as
mood-enhancement induced by cigarettesmokingor
excessive alcohol consumption, but that causes long-term
injury constitutes one.
• Another involves the influence of social and environmental
factors, such as socioeconomic status or stress ondisease
processes. A third consists of individual psychological factors,
• such as hostility anddepression, that interact with the other
two pathways to increase susceptibility to illness.
• Hostility is the psychosocial variable most often
associated with the incidence of CHD. In the
contextof physical health, hostility is defined usually
as a stable attribute characterized by mistrusting
cynicism that leads to antagonistic or aggressive
behaviour and feelings of anger.
• There is a hypothesis that people who are hostile
have exaggerated cardiovascular reactivity to stress
and that this either contributes to the development
of atherosclerosis or triggers acute events.
• Anger is a psychological state thought to be related
to hostility. Expression of anger has been shown to
trigger myocardial infarction.
• In a study of patients undergoing coronary
angiography, recall of anger was a potent stimulus
that induced vasoconstriction in diseased coronary
arteries, but not in healthy arteries.
• The recall of anger can also produce an acute
impairment in ventricular function in patients with
CHD.
• One common premonitory symptom of myocardial infarction is
vital exhaustion, a state of excessive fatigue, increased irritability,
and demoralization.
• Depression affects about half of patients who experience
myocardial infarction.
• Depression predicts significantly poorer outcome with heart
disease and roughly doubles the risk of recurrent cardiovascular
events.
• About half of post-infarction patients with depression have a
history of depression before the onset of CHD, and there is some
evidence suggesting depression as a risk factor for a first
infarction.
• Anxiety and worry have recently received
renewed attention as risk factors for
cardiovascular disease. Hope and optimism, in
contrast, have been suggested as important
components of psychological wellbeing and as
factors that can contribute to good physical
health. A lack of hope is commonly thought to
adversely affect health.
 personality
• Development is important in the biological and
behavioural processes that preserve health or lead to
human disease throughout life. Cumulative experience,
adaptive plasticity, physical and social exchange with
surrounding environments, and genetic predisposition
interact to influence development.
• The unique physiology of each person, partly encoded in
the genome and partly determined by prior physical
exposures and social experiences, generates the
individual behaviours that influence morbidity and
mortality.
• Early childhood, infancy, and even prenatal
experiences appear to have long-term consequences
for health because they influence the biological
mechanisms that underlie stress reactivity.
• There are sociocultural consequences of these
experiences as well. A secure attachment with a
parenting person provides a protective modulator of
the environmental influences on an infant.
Unresponsive,insensitive, or abusive parenting also
can lead to atypical emotional development.