STRESS AND PROGNOSIS
FOLLOWING MYOCARDIAL
INFARCTION
Psychosocial research on patients who have survived
an MI or other ACS has been dominated
by investigations of depression. Clinical
depression is present in ∼1 in 5 patients
in the weeks following acute MI, and a further
25% report significant depressive symptoms.
Depression following MI is an adverse
prognostic indicator, being associated with increased
all-cause and cardiac mortality and with
recurrent nonfatal cardiac events (73). The impact
of stress on the development of depression
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after MI has not been studied extensively. One
study of 314 MI patients found that stressful life
events over the 12 months before MI was not associated
with post-MI depression (20), whereas
another showed that acute stress during the 2-
hour trigger period before cardiac symptom onset
predicted greater depression 1-12 months
later, particularly among patients of lower socioeconomic
status (104).
Stress may also be a prognostic indicator in
its own right. In the 1970s, a measure combining
work, family, and life event stress predicted
increased three-year mortality in the
Beta-Blocker Heart Attack Trial, and the effect
was accentuated when coupled with social
isolation (91). Limited evidence indicates that
persistent work stress predicts recurrent cardiac
events following MI in younger patients
(1), and Georgiades et al. (29) have described
associations between financial strain and recurrent
events. The largest study to date assessed
perceived stress in more than 4,000 MI survivors.
Thirteen percent of patients who reported
moderate or high stress died over the
next two years compared with 9% of patients
with low stress, an effect that was independent
of clinical factors, revascularization, sociodemographic
variables, and depression (4). There
is a pressing need for further systematic data
on the impact of ongoing stress on prognosis in
patients with advanced CHD.