Vital reaction in all individuals, laughter is a powerful natural anti-stress including beneficial for the heart and breath. How?

Being regularly and laugh out loud would be an excellent remedy against stress and its harmful consequences, especially for the cardiovascular system. This is the conclusion of researchers at Cambridge (Massachusetts), thus confirming previous work there a decade by a team of medical school in Baltimore. Their results were presented at the Congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), which is being held in Villepinte.

For the record, the researchers had noticed in Baltimore, there is a decade that people with a heart condition had less of a sense of humor than others. But this work did not whether or not the humor could have a preventive effect vis-à-vis the cardiovascular disease.

Hence the new study by the team of Michael Miller, director of Preventive Cardiology at Cambridge. For this, the researchers alternated with voluntary viewing of movie quotes tragic and comic films. They then found that stress causes a narrowing scenes of vessel diameter, vasoconstriction. In contrast, the funny movies provoked laughter and vasodilation, before returning to normal.

More than 300 measurements have shown that the blood vessels can vary from 30 to 50%, "a similar magnitude to the benefit that you can withdraw from the exercise or taking statins (drugs that lower cholesterol in the blood, Ed), "said Michael Miller. The researcher considers that the act of laughing is involved in a daily healthy lifestyle may prevent cardiovascular disease.

This conclusion is considered by some little early cardiologists attending the conference. "There are many physiological situations that impact on the caliber of vessels, such as cold and heat or exercise. While laughing causes vasodilation, but this does not mean that people do not laugh often have a loss of vasomotor tone.

"In short, if laughter is proper to man and is an obvious source of well-being, it would be rash to assert, given the current state of knowledge, that the absence of such positive emotion affects the health. However, for the French specialist, laughter could be used as a test to assess the capacity of vasodilation of an individual. But it's far less funny.