There may be a new reason to turn that frown upside down. A new study suggests that men with a family history of early heart disease may have inherited a cranky personality or the inability to deal with stress.

The study, conducted at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, found that anger and stress were more significant risk factors for early heart disease than traditional factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes.

"One of the striking things in our study is that when we look at males and females separately, the propensity to inherit early heart disease seems to be limited to men," psychologist Mark W. Ketterer, the lead author of the study, told CTV's Canada AM on Thursday that.

"And it seems to be mediated most strongly, far and away, by being a cranky personality - easily frustrated, irritated, aggravated - that sort of thing."

A group of 100 men and women with heart disease were evaluated for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking and excessive weight.

As well, patients and their spouses completed detailed questionnaires about how often they feel aggravated, irritated, angry, impatient, depressed, anxious and worried.

Ketterer said that if you want to measure this kind of stress, it is better to ask someone close to the patient to assess their personality, rather than the patient themselves.

"It turns out that when you ask the patient, we can only account for about 30 per cent of the relationship between having an early family history of heart disease and having early heart disease yourself," he told host Lisa LaFlamme.

"But when we ask a significant other, it's almost 70 per cent."

The study found that family histories of early heart disease are likely to be diagnosed with problems 12 years early than men with no such family histories. For women, the average age of heart diagnosis was two years earlier.

This doesn't mean that people at risk of early heart disease can't change their fate. Ketterer's hospital offers an aggressive behavior modification program that teaches patients behaviour modification, relaxation techniques and coping strategies.

"People can make different kinds of choices and in making different kinds of choice reduce the intensity of stress in their life," Ketterer said.

Ketterer said he expects his study to be met with skepticism when it is presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Phoenix, Ariz.

"The notion that the mind and the brain affect heart disease is something that's very, very hard for conventional mainstream cardiology to accept," he said.

"But the evidence grows year by year and gets stronger and stronger and as we understand the mechanism as we do in this study, I think the case gets stronger and stronger and more and more difficult to ignore."

A study by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore last year found that young men who become angry in stressful situations are three times more likely to develop heart disease when they hit middle age. They are also five times more likely to suffer a heart attack by age of 55.