ABSTRACT
Background: Symptoms of depression and anxiety are known to be associated with cardiac events. Anxiety is an independent predictor of both cardiac events and increased health care consumption and accounts for the relationship between depressive symptoms and prognosis. Psychological Symptoms need to be considered in the risk stratification and treatment of coronary artery disease (CAD) patients. Materials and Method: A non experimental research design was utilized to assess the psychiatric morbidity in a sample of 60 patients with CAD, attending the outpatient clinic of the Department of Cardiology of a tertiary hospital in Punjab. Symptom checklist -80 was used to assess the psychological deficits. Analysis and interpretation of the data was done using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results: Out of 60 patients, 39.9% of patients had symptoms of moderate depression and 7.70% had severe depressive symptoms. 12.5 % patients had severe anxiety and 39.41% had moderate anxiety symptoms. Anger hostility in both moderate and severe range was observed in 10.14 % of the subjects. Moderately severe depression and anxiety was higher in males as compared to females and the difference was statistically significant. (p=0.024 & p=0.0424). Females had significantly higher anger hostility than males (p=0.0176). Mean score on additional symptoms was 2.71± 4.14 and 5.21± 4.52 among male and female patients respectively. On an average, depression and anger hostility were significantly more in patients with co morbid medical illnesses (p=0.0066), recent invasive procedure undertaken (p=0.03) and who were living alone (p=0.039). Conclusions: Our study concludes that CAD can lead to various psychiatric disorders, which further can complicate the course and outcome of the primary disease itself. Moreover the cost of treatment of CAD and its complication can further worsen the psychiatric disorder. Psychiatric disorders also lead to poor compliance and follow up in CAD patients.