Depression and anxiety can double chances of hear...( Montreal January 18 2008 Matters of...),Health

Montreal, January 18, 2008 Matters of the mind can affect matters of the heart. A new study by McGill University and Universit de Montral researchers has found that major anxiety and/or depression, can double a coronary artery disease patients chances of repeated heart ailments. This is one of the first studies to focus on patients with stable coronary artery disease not those who were hospitalized for events such as a heart attack.

We found that both major depression and generalized anxiety disorder were more common in cardiac patients than in the general community, said principal investigator Nancy Frasure-Smith, a professor at McGills Department of Psychiatry and a researcher at the Centre hospitalier de lUniversit de Montral (CHUM) and Montreal Heart Institute. On average, cardiac patients without these disorders had about a 13 percent chance of a repeated cardiac event over two years, compared to 26 percent of those with either major depression or anxiety.

Dr. Frasure-Smith coauthored the study from the January edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry with Franois Lesprance, a Universit de Montral psychiatry professor and head of the CHUMs Department of Psychiatry. This is the first study to demonstrate that anxiety and depression can have a strong impact on people with stable coronary artery disease, said Lesprance.

The research team interviewed 804 people, patients with stable coronary artery disease who were still monitored by a physician, yet had been discharged from hospital two months prior. Frasure-Smith and Lesprance found 27 percent of interview subjects were affected by depression and 41 percent showed signs of anxiety. Major depressive disorder was diagnosed in roughly 7 percent of patients while about 5 percent had generalized anxiety disorder.

Now that we know that anxiety and major depression are both markers of increased cardiac risk, it is imperative that these patients receive the best treatment fo
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