London, June 11 (IANS) Stress and anxiety can make it harder for wounds to heal, a new study have found.

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, reports timesonline.co.uk.

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

When researchers did analysis of data from 22 studies by different research groups examining stress and wound healing they found similar results.

"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," said Professor John Weinman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

"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," he added.

He further said: "I hope that these findings can now be used to identify psychological interventions to help speed up the recovery and healing process".