Type A personality? That might not be bad for your health

To work on Wall Street, you generally have to be a Type A personality, be able to withstand high stress and be prepared to work long hours. And at least two out of three of those traits are risky to your health.

Earlier this month, we noted a study determined that if you have a high stress job that you have a greater risk of high blood pressure. And just yesterday, another study claimed that if you work long hours, you're also increasing your risk of high blood pressure. Well here's at least one piece of good news: If you're a Type A personality you may be happy to know that contrary to popular belief, yet another new study has determined that there's "absolutely no connection between the hard-driving personality and heart disease".....

Although human genes contribute significantly to a person's health and behavior, these two kinds of traits aren't closely linked at all.

In fact, a study appearing this month in the Public Library of Science found absolutely no connection between the hard-driving personality and heart disease, contrary to previous studies and conventional wisdom.

This is among the first findings of a massive, 10-year effort to measure the genes and traits of a single population of closely related people. Conducted jointly by Italian and Sardinian researchers, the U.S. National Institute on Aging, and bio-statisticians at the University of Michigan, the project recruited 6,148 people aged 14 to 102 in four clustered villages on the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. The sample represents 62 percent of the population of the Lanusei Valley surrounding the four villages....

http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2006/Aug06/r082806