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Can laughter really cure all ills?

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New research from a group of University researchers from the Maryland Medical Centre, Baltimore, suggests that laughter along with humour can help prevent a heart attack from occurring.

The study is the first to medically prove that laughter can help treat heart disease, and discovered that people who suffered from heart problems were 40% less inclined to laugh at many different situations when compared to people that suffered from heart disease that were the same age.

Director of the Centre for Preventive Cardiology in Maryland, Michael Miller M.D. stated that it turns out that the old adage that laughter is good for your health may actually be true when it comes to heart health.

Miller, who is also a professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland, stated that they are not sure yet why laughter actually helps to protect the heart, but they do know that mental stress can cause damage to the endothelium (the barrier that protects blood vessels). The stress can lead to cholesterol build up that causes a heart attack, so it’s possible that laughter helps reduce stress which helps to protect the heart.

As part of the study researchers took at a look at the different humour responses offered by 300 people. Half of the participants in the study had a past bypass surgery or actually suffered a heart attack. The other half did not have any heart disease in their medical histories.

The groups were given two sets of questionnaires: one that offered multiple questions to find out how much people laughed when faced with different situations and another that utilised true and false questions to get a measure of hostility and anger that participants experience.

Miller stated that the clearest finding was that people that suffer from heart disease are generally less good natured when they are faced with situations that occur on an everyday basis. They also were shown to laugh less even when the situation would warrant it and on a day to day basis were more likely to be hostile and angry in tough situations.

 

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