Results of a study looking at depression in cardiac patients reveal surprising results
Physical and mental health may be more closely entwined than doctors knew.
A recent national study of cardiac patients suffering from depression revealed surprising results. Anti-depressant drugs were more effective in alleviating the depression than interpersonal psychotherapy.
"Initially our results seemed surprising, and even disappointing," says Dr. Francois Lesperance, head of the department of psychiatry at the Centre hospitalier de l'Universite de Montreal and director of the study. "We had expected to find that psychotherapy would have a positive effect. After careful analysis of the data, we could see that psychotherapy was no better than regular clinical control visits in improving depressive symptoms. But citalopram, an SSRI antidepressant, was significantly more beneficial than the placebo."
In fact, he says, 20-minute follow-up visits to patients by health care professionals proved equally as beneficial as the psychotherapy sessions and perhaps even more so.
Nearly 20 per cent of cardiac patients suffer major depression and that can have a negative impact on the outcome of their disease.
The study results demonstrate the importance of studying mental-health problems in people with physical disease, says Dr. Remi Quirion, scientific director of the Institute of Neurosciences at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which funded the study.
"This project illustrates the importance of adequately funding health research and specifically research into mental health," Quirion says.
The study, which followed 284 heart patients in Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Halifax and Calgary, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January.
