Type a Minus

Type-A people, Americans have been taught to believe, are the competitive, impatient and hostile individuals who are prime candidates for heart attacks. But after 25 years, that portrait turns out to be highly debatable. At a May 9-10 conference at the University of Kansas, behavioral and medical scientists reached no agreement on whether the subject of the meeting, the Type-A behavior pattern, still exists. "We're all struggling," said Psychologist Larry Scherwitz of the University of California at San Francisco. "We have a concept that's not working. We're trying to find out what's wrong."

According to Scherwitz, six major research programs have failed to uphold the notion that Type-A behavior leads to increased heart risk. Scherwitz's own projects turned up evidence that some Type A's may be better off than many of the placid Type B's. A pioneer in the field, Ray Rosenman of the University of California, Berkeley, now says that Type-A behavior "may not necessarily be bad for any given individual at all." Other researchers reported that many of the traits associated with Type-A behavior, including fast-paced speech and eating and a sense of urgency about time, do not seem to increase the risk of heart attack. Of all the supposedly dangerous Type-A traits, said Redford Williams of Duke University, "only the hostility aspect appears to be related to disease." Like many at the conference, Williams was disturbed by the recent findings. Said he: "It would be nice to put a bubble over the research and not let the rest of the world see it until we know what's going on."