"It's almost meaningless," said Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is a vocal critic of such research. "If someone is rude to you, you don't know if it's discrimination or your perception. People who are already high-strung and hypervigilant may bring that kind of interpretation to the situation and are probably the kind of people who would be at high risk for heart problems."
Jennifer H. Mieres, director of nuclear cardiology at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., said the researchers had not fully ruled out the possibility that the results could be explained by other factors.
"While discrimination may be a factor here, I have a hard time seeing a direct link," said Mieres, a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association.
But Mieres called the study "thought-provoking" and worth following up.
Peter Bach, a senior adviser at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who has done work in this area, said he also was skeptical but agreed that the hypothesis warrants further careful examination.
"This is an incredibly important area of research," Bach said. "It's going to be a very hard problem to fully disentangle because of the difficulty in assigning causality in something that is a patient's interpretation of their experience over a very long period of time. But it's a very important area to pursue in a scientifically valid way."
For their part, Stokes, Person and Geigher said they were uncertain whether their experiences were adversely affecting their health, although they would not rule it out.
"At the very least," Stokes said, "I'm caught off guard every time it happens, but I've learned that you can't allow people to ruin your life. So I just deal with it. I don't walk around with a chip on my shoulder. It is my belief every person is unique, so I try to give everyone I encounter the benefit of the doubt."
