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The Stress Treatment and Health
Risk Project (STAHR)
The STAHR project is a
placebo-controlled experiment designed to help us to better understand
how stressful emotions, such as anger, impatience, and irritability, may
affect risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The STAHR project is
designed to examine whether a short-term intervention might be helpful
in reducing anger, impatience, and irritability in people who are
otherwise healthy. Some of the participants in this study receive an
intervention study drug (citalopram, which is typically used as an
anti-depressant) and others receive an inactive pill. We will examine
not only whether this experimental intervention may have an impact on
behavior, but also whether it may exert beneficial effects on blood
pressure, cholesterol, eating habits, and other factors that tend to
influence cardiovascular health.
This research will
contribute to the existing literature in a number of ways.
- This
study will be the first placebo-controlled study in the
published literature, to our knowledge, to examine the
impact of pharmacotherapy on measures of anger which have
been previously shown to be associated with increased
cardiovascular risk.
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- This
study will be the largest of its kind examining the impact
of this class of drugs (SSRIs) in a sample of normal
volunteers, and it will allow us to uniquely characterize
the manner in which patterns of emotion regulation and
social interaction may be altered through such
interventions, both within and outside of the laboratory.
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- This
study will examine drug effects on a wide variety of
lifestyle and biological variables linked with
cardiovascular disease in a sample selected for its tendency
to be at high risk for heart disease in the future.
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- The
STAHR project represents one of the few controlled studies
available examining short term intervention effects on
cardiovascular reactivity, a characteristic which appears to
be a potential marker of heart disease risk, but for which
few models of treatment have been proposed.
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