Vent Your Spleen, Live Longer
 (HealthDay, 11/14/03)

In 2002 Robert S. Wilson of the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and team, reported the results of the "Religious Orders Study," which examined 1,000 nuns, priests and brothers and concluded that keeping an active mind protects against Alzheimer's Disease. Now these investigators have focused on how suppression or expression of anger affects life span. When they reviewed the medical data from 1994 to 2002 for 851 older adults in religious orders, the scientists found that the 10% of subjects with the greatest tendency to suppress their anger were twice as likely to die during the study period compared with the 10% on the other extreme of the anger expression scale. These findings suggest that people who express anger, rather than "seethe," are less likely to die during a given time period.