A new study has found that stress and anxiety can make it harder for wounds to heal.

According to the reports of timesonline. co. uk, the study was conducted by making wounds on healthy volunteers whose levels of life stress were assessed using a standard questionnaire. The results showed that wounds of the anxious and stressed patients took much longer to heal than those who are not stressed.

It was surfaced by the finding that changes in level of the stress hormone cortisol reflected the differences in healing speed.

It was also reported that when researchers did analysis of data from 22 studies by different research groups examining stress and wound healing they found similar results.

Professor John Weinman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, said, "My overall research interests are focused on investigating and assessing how patients perceive illness and treatment, and how this affects the way they respond to and recover from a range of physical health problems."

He further added, "These studies focus specifically on how the life stresses people experience can impact on their ability to recover from different types of wound, such as those caused by surgical procedures and by different medical conditions, including venous leg ulcers."

"I hope that these findings can now be used to identify psychological interventions to help speed up the recovery and healing process," he said. (With Inputs from Agencies)