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

March 19 (UPI) -- 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% 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% were married. Over 16 years, eight months of follow-up, 473, or 64%, 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% higher risk of dying from all causes. However, the study caveats this finding, noting social coping included "other-directed action that may deplete emotional and physical resources instead of bolstering them."

A link was also established between higher problem stressfulness and greater coping effort.

The study results suggest that contrary to previous research focusing on problem stressfulness and specific coping strategies, total coping effort may be an important indicator for longevity among aging men.

"How much older men did in response to stressors mattered more for their survival than what they did," said senior and corresponding author Lewina Lee, clinical psychologist at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the VA Boston Healthcare System.

"Our finding held up even after we considered individual differences in demographics, marital status, major health conditions, and lifestyle factors at study baseline.

"Studying coping is important because this is an aspect of the stress-health equation that is within our control yet it is very much overlooked."

Existing studies have linked stress, including type, duration and the stress response levels people report, to higher mortality risk, there has been little research into the long-term health consequences of how people cope with stress in large-scale studies.

According to the researchers, psychological aging studies have shown that people gain tremendous ability and expertise in coping with stressors over the span of their lives, so that by the time they reach later life, they can use fewer coping strategies to achieve the same results as younger adults who have to work much harder to deal with their problems.

"Our findings suggest that if an older adult deviates from this pattern by using a lot of energy to deal with stressors, it may be a sign that they are struggling and do not have what they need to manage the problem at hand," said first author Victoria Marino, a postdoctoral fellow at Avedisian.

Lee said the findings showed that more attention needed to be paid to the challenges aging may pose and to spotting the signs older people may need additional support to stay health and maintain their independence and well being.

The study was conducted with the help of grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs.