If you have found yourself discussing whether terrorism threat levels or cable news networks terrorism alerts are having a negative affect on your health, researchers have confirmed the implications. Terrorism fear-mongering is increasing heart disease risk in Americans. A group of researchers have published their findings about heart disease, terrorism and 9/11 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. If you want to dig into the study yourself, you can read the published report here.

The study was completed on 2,729 adults and was conducted over a 3 year period. The participants in the study were used because they had existing health surveys and information done on them previous to September 11th, 2001. By using participants with previous accepted information on them before 9/11 it created a baseline to track any increases in health ailments. Other possible problems were taken into consideration for the study such as pre 9/11 cardiovascular conditions, mental health status, smoking, body mass and a range of other preexisting conditions.

It was found that overall there was a 53% increased incidence of cardiovascular ailments over the 3 years following September 11th, 2001. Not all individuals reported that they had an ongoing worry about terrorism after the 9/11 attacks but roughly 5% of the total participants did say they were worrying about terrorism in their daily lives. Another quick thing to note is that none of the participants in this study were from states that were attacked or predicted to have attacks, such as the state of New York.

If you take the 5% figure and apply it to the U.S. current population which is at 303,445,424 according to the live U.S. Census clock here, then you get 15,127,271 Americans that are most likely experiencing acute stress reactions that are providing them with cardiovascular ailments. Obviously not all people are going to find themselves with a heart attack or stroke in the next couple of years, but it is all but proven that terrorism and the terrorism alerts on TV are feeding unhealthy conditions for everyone.

Another study was just released with very similar information about America’s battle with mental health issues due to terrorism fear. This study was performed by the University of Illinois at Chicago. You can read more about this study from the American Journal of Public Health’s February 2008 issue here.

As with the last study, data was obtained before September 11th, 2001 and long after the actual day of the attack. There have been previous studies done on anxiety, stress and the increase in drinking among adults after 9/11 but this study goes years beyond the event.

What is revealed in this research is that even years after a traumatic event like September 11th, 2001 anxiety, stress, hostility, depression and unhealthy things such as drinking can still increase or be abnormal due to past events. In addition to these findings, the study also found that 27.6 percent of participants had less faith in the government’s protective abilities and that 30 percent were more pessimistic about world peace.

With the number of people killed in the U.S. in 2001 from terrorism at 2,978 plus 5 from anthrax, we must eventually learn to focus on health and healing efforts to help people better deal with the stress. In 2001, heart disease killed 700,000 Americans and suicide took 30,622 lives. Our brave new world delivers terror threats as breaking news by the minute, every day, around the world. It could be beneficial to turn the TV off when you’re getting too much of your fill of fear selling, as it only has a possibility of changing your own health for the worse. When the news networks make every atrocity seem so close to home, it’s hard to establish the real risk to our daily lives, which is usually a very small amount of risk.

It was well put by Marc Siegel, a clinical associate professor at New York University, “Fear serves us best when it warns us about things that directly threaten us. We must learn to put risk into proper perspective for the sake of our health. If, instead, we remain at the ready, in fight-or-flight mode, revved up by each alert, it will literally make us sick.” Help fight heart disease, depression, anxiety and substance abuse by turning a deaf ear to the drumbeat of terrorism because in America we haven’t seen an attack since 2001.