CHICAGO — Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on Monday. Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood. ‘It’s definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase,’ said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. ‘Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart,’ Lampert said. She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal heart beat. ‘These were people we know already had some vulnerability to arrhythmia,’ Lampert said in a telephone interview. Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert’s team did a test […]