Go-Getters, Beware!

What factors are suspected of contributing to Western man's soaring death rate from heart and artery disease? Personality and behavior are emerging as increasingly .important. This week San Francisco's Dr. Meyer Friedman told the American Heart Association in Philadelphia of a link connecting an individual's behavior in a stressful occupation, through hormone channels, to the vital arteries that supply the heart. In the report, go-getters come off with a poor prognosis.

Internist Friedman and Partner Ray Rosenman had already shown that hard-driving editors, ad men, sales managers and men in similar competitive careers have more cholesterol in their blood, shorter clotting time and more heart-artery disease than men of more relaxed temperaments, in less exacting jobs (TIME, Nov. 3, 1958). This was true even when the tranquil men ate as much animal fat, smoked as much, and got as little exercise as the climbers. Dr. Friedman suspected that taut emotions worked on the arteries through hormones. But which? And was it a 24-hour process, or did it happen mainly during the gogetters' working hours?

From the outstandingly competitive men and their opposites, the researchers picked a dozen of each, persuaded them to keep samples of their urine all day on the job, and a nighttime specimen for comparison. Analysis showed what happened to the excretion (and therefore, presumably, to the body's output) of various kinds of hormones. Adrenocortical hormones such as hydrocortisone were similar in the two groups, and varied little between day and night. But on the job, the competitive men's adrenaline jumped 86% above night readings, as against 36% for the comparison group. With noradrenaline, said Dr. Friedman, the jump was still more pronounced: 173% compared with 64%. In large amounts, both these hormones (and especially noradrenaline) might well lead to damaging wear and tear on the heart and arteries.

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