It appears that heart patients may be much more susceptible to depression and possibly anxiety than people who have not suffered heart problems such as congestive heart failure and heart attacks.  For this reason, there has been a call for cardio doctors to put their heart patients through a depression screening and also to treat their patients for depression if they come out on the positive scale for depression.

The screening really refers to a very simple questionnaire that asks the patient if they have been feeling down and/or depressed in the past few weeks, and if the patient answers yes to two or more of the depression specific questions asked by their cardiologist, then the patient should begin to either be treated by the doctor or to be referred to a mental health specialist so they can go through therapy and possibly even get on some sort of drug if needed, hopefully in combination with therapy because we all know how ineffective treating depression can be without therapy to go with it. 

Doctors are also saying that heart patients need screening, but they also need to be followed up on, since many paitents do not voluntarily follow up for depression, perhaps because they are not sure why they are feeling this way, will think that it will pass, or that they simply are afraid fo the stigma that depression has with it.

Also heart patients are encouraged to follow up on their heart treatment with exercise and diet, which can also immensely boost mood as we all know, and which of course also increases a heart patients odds of not having another incident that is potentially life threatening or fatal since diet and exercise are definitely tied to heart health.   

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 8:47 am and is filed under Alternative & Herbal Health News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.