Can a heart treatment lower depression and anxiety?
21 September, 2018
Many people who have atrial fibrillation experience symptoms of mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Do particular treatments for this condition help resolve such symptoms? A new study suggests they might.
Atrial fibrillation (A-fib) is a common condition characterized by an irregular heart rhythm.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 2.7–6.1 million people in the United States have A-fib.
Studies show that about a third of people with this heart condition also have symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Starting from this evidence, researchers from Australia decided to look into how various treatments for A-fib might influence a person's levels of psychological distress.
The results of the study — the senior author of which is Jonathan Kalman, of the Royal Melbourne Hospital — were published earlier this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Which treatment improves mental health?
The researchers worked with a cohort of 78 participants who had received some form of treatment for A-fib. The team monitored the participants' levels of depression and anxiety and evaluated and took into consideration their personality traits.
Of the total number of participants, 20 had received ablations, a type of procedure through which the heart tissue that produces the irregular heartbeat is removed or destroyed.
The remaining 58 participants chose to take drugs to regulate heart rate and prevent the formation of blood clots.
At the beginning of the study, 35 percent of the participants said that they lived with symptoms of severe anxiety and psychological distress. A further 20 percent reported suicidal ideation.
After a year from the beginning of the study, those who opted for an ablation tended to report lower levels of depression and anxiety compared with those who took drugs as therapy.
More of the people who had received ablations also reported no longer having suicidal thoughts. Specifically, the number of individuals with suicidal ideation fell from six to one among those participants.
Kalman believes that the new findings "[demonstrate] that effective treatment of atrial fibrillation markedly reduces psychological distress."
"This psychological impact," he adds, "is not well appreciated by many heart specialists and is important to take into consideration" — particularly when deciding on the most appropriate treatment for A-fib.
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