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Depression (and subjective quality of life) can affect BP and HR variability. The results indicate the role that psychological factors may play in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease. Therapeutic implications are suggested for primary and secondary prevention.

New components of transdisciplinary spectra or known components in new variables in us, matching those around us, are being mapped. Their hardly trivial interactions associated with the good and bad around us -from religiosity to crime and war -are being rendered measurable, for the eventual development of countermeasures to the diseases of societies and nations. Internal cycles not only underlie life itself and underlie our evolving genetics at all levels of organization; they also constitute the essential control and reference information in all transdisciplinary science. In preparing for travel to Mars and other missions in space that may take more than a year, let us do what is immediately practicable. Transyears may have very small amplitudes yet are associated with sudden cardiac death in some terrestrial locations; if they should play a role in these electrical incidents of the heart, among others like myocardial infarction and stroke, they will jeopardize lengthy missions in extraterrestrial space, away from hospitals.The likelihood of stroke or cardiac death can be immediately reduced by chronobiologically assessing blood pressure and heart rate variability and by optimizing the efficacy of timed treatment rather than relying on an unacceptable and often inaccurate spotcheck and treating by convenience rather than pertinence. Needed are: detection of nocturnal abnormality when medication may no longer be effective (or is too effective) neither seen during office visits by day; detection of circadian hyperamplitude-tension (CHAT) associated with a risk of stroke and kidney disease greater than other risks Halberg et al.: Chronobiology's progress I 2 (including "hypertension" when all risks are assessed concomitantly); detection of CHAT as high risk among normotensives who may not need anti-hypertensive medication; individualized inferential statistical testing to determine whether a drug or non-drug intervention such as autogenic training (relaxation) is effective and for how long (detecting any initial and later success or failure), some of which conditions otherwise are not found without chronobiology; individualization of treatment timing, since the same dose of the same medication can further lower the subject's blood pressure average and circadian amplitude when the timing of daily administration is optimized, as ascertained by sequential testing and parameter tests.Thus, we save lives by monitoring and assessing, and if need be treating, vascular disease risk through chronobiologically interpreted 24-hour or preferably longer (24-hour/7-day) blood pressure and heart rate variability. Abnormalities in the variability of blood pressure and heart rate, impossible to find during a conventional office visit (the latter aiming at the fiction of a "true" blood pressure), can raise cardiovascular disease risk in the next six years from 4% to 100%.· Dedicated to Alejandro Zaffaroni, who came as a pleasant surprise with flowers and more. May a marker-guided preventive chronotherapy of elevations of the risks ...