Individuals who experience depression after a heart attack don’t appear to do as well, even if their bout with depression is only temporary. Since one in five patients do experience some form of depression sometime within that first year following an attack, physicians have tended to treat the condition as a normal reaction to serious illness.
However, a recent study reports that depression may be a better predictor of a patient’s recovery than other traditional gauges. Of the heart patients evaluated in the study, almost twenty seven percent had experienced depression. After six months, all of the depressed patients were more likely to have been re-hospitalized or to have died than the patients who reported no depression. The depressed patients also experienced more chest pain, more disability, and worse quality of life.
It is recommended that patients, their families and their doctors realize that feeling depressed after a heart attack is not “normal,” and shouldn’t be ignored.
The report also encourages future research to determine if treating depression in heart attack patients can help improve the outcome.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, October, 2006.
This article is meant to alert you to a potentially serious and detrimental over sight in the health care system. Some people think you should just be thankful to be alive after a heart attack, and most of you are thankful, but many will suffer from depression and have it ignored. The article points out the increased likelihood of more health conditions or possible death. That should wake you up to go to a good counselor and get to work on why the depression exists. Frankly, just preventing a one day stay in the hospital by managing this situation will more than pay for you counselor for the entire year.
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God Bless,
Dr. Benzinger
