Anxiety can cause all sorts of cardiovascular symptoms: racing heartbeat, rapid breathing, and chest pain. But can it cause a heart murmur?
Although typically not listed as a cause, according to the Better Health Channel, emotional stress can increase blood flow and interfere with the force of your heartbeat. And this can potentially cause a physiologic heart murmur.
According to Harvard Medical School, if you’re anxious, you may be more likely to have a heart murmur. Anxiety, according to the Anxiety and Depression Society of America is a reaction to stress.
Read on to learn more about heart murmurs and how stress can affect your overall cardiovascular health.
How can stress affect your heart?
While there’s limited information out there about how stress is connected to heart murmurs, stress has been known to increase the likelihood of certain behaviors and events that play a role in negatively affecting heart health.
These behaviors and events include smoking, overeating, and bodily responses like an increase in cortisol levels, which can lead to an increase in blood pressure.
Stress is also known to create anxiety, which is connected to physiologic heart murmurs.
What exactly is a heart murmur?
Harvard Medical School describes a heart murmur as the sound of turbulent blood flow within your heart. When a doctor using a stethoscope hears an unusual sound between heartbeats, this can often represent that turbulent flow from a heart murmur .
If your heart doesn’t have a murmur, the doctor will hear your blood flowing through your heart with a rhythmic “lub dub” sound.
If your heart does have a murmur, your doctor will hear a “whooshing” or “swishing” sound, which occurs between the “lub dub” sounds. It can happen when your heart squeezes (systolic murmur) or when it relaxes (diastolic murmur). Diastolic murmurs are almost always abnormal or pathological.
There are 2 types of heart murmurs:
- Flow murmur (also called functional or physiologic)
- Abnormal (also called pathological)
Physiologic heart murmurs
When blood flows through your heart more rapidly than normal, the sound it makes is referred to as a flow murmur or physiologic murmur.
Physiologic heart murmurs can go away on their own, depending on the underlying condition causing the flow murmur. They can also last your whole life without causing health problems.
According to the American Heart Association, physiologic heart murmurs are common in health babies, kids, and teens. They usually go away during adulthood, but sometimes they remain.
