How stalking harms women’s heart health

You can feel the scene before you can explain it. The repeated texts that are not questions but demands. The car that idles too long across the street. The AirTag found in a tote you never leave unattended. Online, there is a chorus of women narrating the hypervigilance. IRL, there is the quiet choreography of detours, screenshots, and friends walking each other to the door. None of this reads like heart disease. It reads like survival.

The new science is blunt. Women who report being stalked are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease in the years that follow. A large analysis in Circulation tracked more than 66,000 women for two decades and found a 41 percent higher risk among those who had been stalked. Women who had obtained restraining orders showed an even steeper climb at 70 percent. Put both experiences together and the risk rose further. These are not small numbers. They reframe stalking as a public health event with long shadows.

It helps to name what is happening in the body. Chronic fear is not a vibe. It is a physiological state that primes the autonomic nervous system to scan for danger on loop. That loop pushes up blood pressure, shifts blood vessel function, and seeds inflammation that does not clock off when the messages stop. Researchers have been connecting interpersonal violence and cardiovascular sequelae for years. The new stalking data sits on top of that pattern, not outside it.

The gendered part matters. Young women are particularly prone to a phenomenon called mental stress induced myocardial ischemia. Picture blood flow to the heart dipping during stress tests that do not require a treadmill but a hard memory. Women who have survived a heart attack are about twice as likely as men to display this kind of stress ischemia. It is often silent. It is still dangerous. Mechanisms point to microvascular dysfunction and exaggerated vasoconstriction under mental load. The line from stalker-induced hypervigilance to vulnerable microcirculation is not neat, yet the physiology rhymes.

If you spend time in women’s forums, the vocabulary is practical, not clinical. There are threads about route-planning, privacy settings, and that tangle of whether to block or to mute. There are notes about courts and police reports and the long wait between filing and feeling safe. The Circulation study found that even the act of obtaining a restraining order mapped to higher cardiovascular risk. That detail reads like a proxy for severity. It also hints at the bureaucratic stress that stacks on top of the initial threat. Health outcomes do not respect the boundary between the event and the paperwork.

There is another layer that culture tends to minimize. Post-traumatic stress is more common in women, and it carries its own cardiovascular penalties. Decades of work have tied PTSD symptoms to higher rates of coronary disease, heart attacks, and stroke in women. Trauma without full PTSD still moves the risk needle. This is the part that complicates the story for anyone who asks why she did not “move on.” The body did not.

If this sounds like a dramatic leap from DMs to cardiology, consider how we talk about other stress routes. Job strain as a risk factor is mainstream conversation. So are headlines about stress cardiomyopathy and the catchier name for it that centers broken hearts. Stalking sits in the same family of wear and tear. The difference is agency. You can quit a job. You cannot easily quit a man who will not leave you alone. That absence of exit is its own physiological weight.

The everyday rituals that follow stalking also carry health cargo. People shift to driving instead of walking. They avoid parks, night classes, and early-morning runs. A life that used to include some accidental cardio gets trimmed to the safest corridor between home and work. The point is not to moralize about movement. The point is to notice how safety decisions reshape the heart’s environment long before any clinician gets a chance to ask about cholesterol.

On social platforms, there is a quiet etiquette around receipts. Women screenshot everything. They timestamp. They build files. Even when authorities do act, the process takes time. That time is not neutral. The Harvard-linked team behind the stalking study suggested that psychological distress can impair vascular function and ripple through biological pathways that push cardiovascular risk up. The numbers are strong enough to argue for screening and resources in health care settings. If we do not ask about stalking, we will miss what the heart has been absorbing.

It is tempting to end with advice. That is not this. What lands here is recognition. When we say How stalking impacts women's heart health, we are not speaking in metaphor. We are talking about arteries learning a fear pattern that outlives the notifications. We are talking about a risk curve that rises with legal involvement because the situation was already severe. We are talking about women who will one day show up in cardiology waiting rooms without the language that links the chest pain to the year someone would not let them be.

Public stories usually end when the stalker disappears. Bodies do not end there. The more we treat stalking as a health determinant, the more the system can respond in time. Primary care can ask. Emergency rooms can document. Cardiologists can factor stress ischemia into the way they read a woman’s symptoms that do not look like a textbook. Friends can hold the walking route without minimizing what it costs. None of this fixes the threat. It names the weight where it lives.

When a study translates a private terror into a hazard ratio, it does not make the fear less personal. It makes it legible. That is a start. The rest is clumsy and human. It is reclaiming routines that make the body feel like home again. It is knowing that the heart is not just a metaphor for love but the organ that tries to protect you from it when love turns into surveillance. It is refusing to shrink the story to a headline about drama. The headline is health.

The internet will keep telling women to trust their gut. The labs will keep telling us what that gut does to the rest of the system. Between those two is the reality of living under attention you did not ask for. The numbers will evolve. The core message will not. Stalking is not only a safety issue. It is a cardiovascular one. The body keeps the receipts, and now the journals do too.