• Posted December 19, 2025

Depression, Anxiety Increase Heart Disease Risk Through Stress, Experts Say

Depression and anxiety are linked to a higher risk of heart attack, heart disease and stroke, and researchers now think they know why.

These mood disorders appear to drive brain activity and nervous system responses that place additional stress on the heart, researchers reported Dec. 17 in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging.

“These findings give us a clearer biological picture of how emotional distress ‘gets under the skin’ and affects cardiovascular health,” said lead researcher Dr. Shady Abohashem, head of cardiac PET/CT imaging trials at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“For clinicians, it’s a reminder to view mental health as an integral part of cardiovascular risk assessment,” he said in a news release. “For patients, it’s encouragement that addressing chronic stress, anxiety or depression is not just a mental health priority, it’s also a heart health priority.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 85,500 people participating in a large-scale ongoing research project at Mass General Brigham.

Nearly 15,000 of the people had both depression and anxiety, and more than 15,800 had either one or the other, researchers said. The rest had neither condition.

Participants were followed for a little over three years, during which more than 3,000 had a heart attack, heart failure or stroke.

“In line with previous reports, we found that both depression and anxiety were linked to a higher risk of heart attack or stroke,” senior researcher Dr. Ahmed Tawakol said in a news release. He’s director of nuclear cardiology at the Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute.

“Notably people who were diagnosed with both depression and anxiety faced roughly a 32% higher risk compared with those diagnosed with only one condition,” Tawakol continued. “Importantly, these associations remained strong even after accounting for differences in lifestyle behaviors, socioeconomic factors and traditional risk factors such as smoking, diabetes and hypertension.”

Analysis of brain imaging data showed that people with depression or anxiety had increased activity in their amygdala, a brain region associated with stress, researchers said.

These folks also had higher levels of CRP, a protein linked to inflammation.

“Together, these changes seem to form a biological chain linking emotional stress to cardiovascular risk,” Abohashem said. “When the brain’s stress circuits are overactive, they can chronically trigger the body’s ‘fight or flight’ system, leading to increased heart rate, blood pressure and chronic inflammation. Over time, these changes can damage blood vessels and accelerate heart disease.”

This, he said, "reinforces that protecting heart health isn’t just about diet or exercise, it’s also about emotional health.”

Because the study was based on observational data, it can’t prove a cause-and-effect link between mood disorders and heart problems, researchers noted. 

More research is needed to discover whether mood disorders are causing heart disease or are simply associated with it.

Researchers are now looking into whether stress-reduction therapies or lifestyle changes can lower heart risk among people with mood disorders.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about heart disease and mental health.

SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, Dec. 17, 2025