undefined

points

[-]

If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?

by dlisboa6 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported.

I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed.

This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group.

- [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

by Etheryte3 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.

by stopwatch46196 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

may be true in some specific cases, but put like this it's just vague and impossible to verify

by esseph6 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

I can find data supporting the disability claim, but not precisely the death claim - however that depends on how you classify heart attacks and strokes.

by alistairSH2 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Maybe if you slice up disorders into arbitrarily small groups, you can get "anxiety" to the 2nd leading cause of death?

But, generally, I've seen mortality causes listed as something like (1) cardiovascular disease (2) cancers.

Googling directly for "where does anxiety rank as a cause of death" the answer is something like "it's rarely the proximate cause of daeth, but is associated with higher all-cause mortality"