Anxiety and life-course mortality.

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Anxiety is an unpleasant and common problem and many people attend their doctors asking for help. There are very effective medicines for reducing anxiety, but in humans and animals anxiety seems to involve noticing and escaping from danger so may be a useful characteristic.I have already completed a study which showed that the less anxious half of a large group of British school children suffered many more accidents and fatal accidents in their young adult lives than the more anxious half of the group. This is the first scientific work showing that anxiety is useful for people.I plan to follow on from this work, looking at different, larger groups of people from different countries, whose anxiety was measured in different ways at different stages in their lives. I hope to find out more about the some of the useful and harmful things about anxiety, working towards a better understanding so that in the future doctors can be confident that when they reduce someone‘s anxiety with medicines they know they are really helping rather than harming that person.