Coronary artery diseaseA prospective study of dominance and coronary heart disease in the normative aging study☆
Section snippets
Methods
This study was carried out in the Normative Aging Study, which is a longitudinal study of aging established by the Veterans Administration in 1961.11 The study cohort consisted of 2,280 men from the Greater Boston area who were from 21 to 80 years old at the time of entry. Volunteers were screened at entry according to health criteria,11 and were free of known chronic medical conditions (including diabetes mellitus) at the start of follow-up.
Results
The mean dominance score among subjects with complete and valid data was 6.66 (SD, 2.76; range 0 to 12). The distribution of responses to the dominance scale in the entire cohort is shown in Figure 1.
Table Ipresents the distribution of CHD risk factors as a function of dominance level. Compared with subjects with low dominance scale scores, subjects with high dominance scale score were younger, heavier, and more likely to be current smokers. Age, weight, and smoking are, of course,
Discussion
To our knowledge, this study is the first to report a significant prospective relation between questionnaire assessed dominance and CHD in men. Moreover, this relation remained significant even after adjusting for traditional risk factors and anger.
There are 4 other studies,1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in addition to the present one, that have also reported a significant positive relation between social dominance and CHD. A major difference between these previous studies and the present one is that in the
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This study was supported by grants HL 54098 and AG 02287. The Normative Aging Study is supported by the Cooperative Studies Program/ERIC, Department of Veterans Affairs, and is a component of the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Kawachi was supported by a Career Development Award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Maryland; and by the MacArthur Foundation Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, Chicago, Illinois.