Trait Anxiety is Weakly Associated with Arterial Stiffness in Healthy Adults

Previous work has shown that trait anxiety is a predictor of resting blood pressure and sympathetic nerve activity in humans. Sympathetic activity, blood pressure, and arterial stiffness are often linked, therefore we sought to determine if trait anxiety would be positively associated with arterial stiffness in healthy adults. We further tested whether trait anxiety would be positively associated with aortic wave reflection and / or aortic pulsatile load (APL). Participants included 90 healthy adults (24±1 years; 55 males and 35 females), and we examined trait anxiety with the 20-item STAI questionnaire, and carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV), aortic augmentation index normalized to 75 heart beats per minute (AIx75), and APL (aortic pulse pressure x heart rate) from data collected with a SphygmoCor system (CPVH, Sydney, Australia) in the supine position after 10 minutes of quiet rest. Pearson correlations were performed to evaluate the potential relationships between trait anxiety, cfPWV, AIx75, and APL. There was a weak positive association between the percentile score of trait anxiety and cfPWV (r=0.178, p=0.101). However, there was no association between percentile trait anxiety and AIx75 (r=-0.049, p=0.651) or APL (r=0.083, p=0.444). Except for the weak association between trait anxiety and cfPWV, our results are contrary to our hypotheses. Overall trait anxiety scores do not appear to have a strong association with the vascular measures included in the present study. We will continue to further investigate individual components of trait anxiety, such as worry, and how they may be more predictive of vascular health and cardiovascular risk. Support: NIH (AA-024892 and 1R15HL140596-01). This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.