“Today, we know that the heart is not the source of love or the other emotions, per se. In the past, people believed the heart served as the home for love. Throughout history, the heart has been used as a symbol of romantic love and other intense emotional states. “My talk today will focus on these (psychological) factors, on what one might call the emotional heart.” “But as important as the Framingham Heart Study has been in advancing our understanding of coronary heart disease, it does not tell the whole story,” Jauhar said. Later, a 12-year study of approximately 20,000 Swedish men found that four out of five heart attacks could be prevented through Framingham-inspired lifestyle changes. Key findings of this study, and others around the 1960s, found that high blood pressure, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and smoking were all risk factors of cardiovascular heart disease. Jauhar’s lecture, titled “The Emotional Heart,” opened the Interfaith Lecture Series theme on “Home: A Place for Human Thriving,” and explored how emotional heart health can affect physical heart health. Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist and author of Heart: A History, speaks Monday in the Hall of Philosophy. “This would turn out to be a major flaw.” As one researcher put it, the Framingham study as it emerged in the 1950s had ‘little interest in investigating psychosomatic, constitutional or sociological determinants of heart disease,’ ” Jauhar said. “Questions about sexual dysfunction, psychiatric problems, emotional stress, income and social class were discarded. Even though the study originally considered emotional and mental states as potential risk factors, it shifted focus toward biological risk factors rather than psychological. In his lecture, “The Emotional Heart,” Jauhar used his expertise and research in the field of cardiology to explain how emotions not only affect heart health, but how they have the power to actually shape the heart.ĭrawing on a study conducted in the small town of Framingham, Massachusetts, in the 1940s, Jauhar said much of what is known about heart disease was born from this study.Īt that time, cardiovascular heart disease accounted for nearly half of all deaths in the United States, and the Framingham study aimed to discover why. Jauhar, a practicing cardiologist and the author of Heart: A History, introduced Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Home: A Place for Human Thriving” on Monday, Aug. While these complications with the heart are normally blamed on physical, biological factors, cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar argues one’s mental state affects the heart more than one would imagine. In the United States, one in five deaths are caused by heart disease, and one person dies every 34 seconds from cardiovascular disease, according to the CDC.

Sandeep jauhar heart a history