Anger Common Before Injury

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Guys, watch out the next time anger threatens to overtake common sense. You could wind up in the hospital. That's the conclusion of a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher who found that anger increased the risk of injury, especially for men, after interviewing more than 2,400 emergency-room patients at three Missouri hospitals.

The study, published Tuesday in the Annals of Family Medicine journal, found that people who described themselves as feeling "hostile" before getting hurt faced twice the risk of injury. And compared to women, men were more likely to injure themselves when angry.

"When we men start to get angry, maybe we need to take a step back," said Dan Vinson, a professor of family and community medicine and the study's primary author.

Surprisingly, Vinson said he found no statistical connection between self-descriptions of anger and traffic accidents - a finding that suggests road rage may be more of an internal state of mind rather than an outward behavior with violent consequences.