MONDAY, Jan. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Patients who are clinically depressed are at higher risk for cardiac arrest than non-depressed patients, and their risk correlates with level of depression, according to a report in the Jan. 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Jean-Philippe Empana, M.D., Ph.D., from the Hopital Paul Brousse in Villejuif, France, and colleagues used data from a case-control study of 2,228 Washington State residents who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest between 1980 and 1994, and 4,164 controls.
Those who were diagnosed as clinically depressed were 1.88 times more likely to have a cardiac arrest than those who were not, which remained significant after adjusting for confounding factors. The risk was independent of age, sex or prior history of heart disease and increased with severity of depression.
"Alteration of the imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic tone has been described in depressed subjects, yielding the possibility that this population may be at particular increased risk of sudden cardiac death," the authors write. "To the extent that similar results are observed in other settings, these results may have potential clinical implications with regard to risk stratification for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest."
Abstract
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