Competitive Types Mend Faster? : Study Tying Personality to Heart Attack Recovery Hit

SAN FRANCISCO —  Hard-driving “Type A” personalities who are said to face a greater risk of heart attacks also recover from them more quickly than the mellower “Type Bs,” a researcher has concluded.

But the study was criticized by Dr. Meyer Friedman, who started classifying such people in the first place and conducted an earlier study of the same men.

“If we had to look at (the men used in the study) today, we would call them all Type A,” Friedman said. “That would have been discovered if they had used the present diagnostic procedures.”

Topic for Conference

The study was presented by researcher David R. Ragland of the University of California, Berkeley, at the 1986 Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology, sponsored by the American Heart Assn. in San Francisco.

He authored the study along with a UC Berkeley biostatistics professor, Richard J. Brand, and Dr. Ray H. Rosenman.

Ragland said the conclusions were based on a nine-year study of 3,154 men in the San Francisco Bay Area that was started by Friedman and Rosenman in 1960.

Ragland said the researchers focused on 257 men in the original study who had suffered heart attacks, had angina or had exhibited electrocardiogram abnormalities.

All but two of the men were located, Ragland said, and 35% of them had died of heart disease.

Chances for Survival

But among Type A’s who survived at least a day after a heart attack or had less serious symptoms of heart disease, the survival rate was about 1.7 times better than among Type Bs, Ragland said.

“One speculation was that Type A’s may cope better with heart disease once it occurs,” he concluded.

“Type A’s may tend to deny symptoms,” he said. “In some ways, this may alleviate anxiety and physiological stress.”

Type A characteristics have been described as competitive, impatient and often hostile behavior, while Type Bs are more relaxed and less hostile.

Friedman has suggested that people could reduce their risks of heart disease by learning to relax and changing from a Type A person to a Type B in his book, “Type A Behavior and Your Heart.”

Picture Not Clear

“But now, it is not clear whether a change from a Type A to a Type B is going to have an overall positive effect on a person’s chance of surviving heart disease or heart attacks,” Ragland said.

However, Diane Ulmer, executive director of the Meyer Friedman Institute at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, said a research project she worked on with Friedman shows that changing from Type A behavior to Type B reduced the risk of heart attacks.

She said the study, released in 1985, studied 900 people who had suffered heart attacks. She said 600 of those went through a four-year behavior modification program and had 48% fewer heart attacks that the 300 who did not change their behavior.

Question of Severity

Ulmer also criticized the report’s findings that Type A’s cope better after a heart attack than Type Bs. She said Ragland’s study may have misdiagnosed people and that the severity of the heart attacks was not taken into consideration.

“It is well known that if a heart attack is more severe, chance of survivability is less,” she said.