Depression or anxiety double the risk of heart ailments: people with existing cardiac disease need appropriate mental health treatment.(MIND & MEMORY)

Having depression or anxiety doubles the risk of major cardiac events such as heart attack in people with heart disease, according to a study published in the January Archives of General Psychiatry. The results indicate that "It is just as important to get help for major depression or anxiety disorders as it is to get your heart disease under control," says the study's lead researcher, Nancy Frasure-smith, PhD, professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill university in Montreal, and a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute and the Centre Hospitalier de l'Universite de Montreal Research Center.

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DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY. Researchers assessed 804 patients with stable coronary artery disease (CAD) for serious types of depression and anxiety called major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) using standard psychiatric tests. over two years, the researchers found that 57 (7.1 percent) of participants had MDD and 43 (5.3 percent) had GAD. An additional 11 (1.4 percent) had both disorders (see "What You should Know").

Dr. Frasure-smith says other research also has found links between depression and heart disease. "If you look at the criteria for major depression and generalized anxiety disorder, there is a lot of overlap," she says. "There are distinctions between the two, but some of the symptoms are similar. We wanted to determine the incidence of both [disorders], since they are closely linked."

TWICE THE RISK. In the study, people with MDD or GAD had about a 26 percent chance of being readmitted to the hospital for an adverse heart-related problem compared to about 13 percent of those without depression or anxiety. Heart-related problems included:

* Non-elective "revascularization," such as emergency placement of heart stents in coronary arteries

* Heart attack