PTSD linked to increased heart death risk

MUNICH, Germany, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Patients with cardiac defibrillators may have a higher death risk if they have post-traumatic stress disorder, German researchers said.

Dr. Karl-Heinz Ladwig of Technische Universitaet Muenchen in Germany and Helmholtz Zentrum National Research Center for Environmental Health in Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues studied 211 patients who had received implantable cardiac defibrillators -- devices that administer shocks to help restore normal heartbeat -- following a heart event in 1998. Participants were surveyed an average of 27 months after implantation and 38 reported severe PTSD symptoms.

During the average follow-up period of five years, 45 of the patients, or 30.6 percent, died. This included 32 of the 109 patients with low or moderate PTSD symptoms and 13 of 38 patients with high levels of such symptoms.

"Our findings provide direct evidence for an independent influence of PTSD symptoms on fatal outcome in these patients," the study authors said in a statement.

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found those experiencing PTSD symptoms conferred a 2.4-fold long-term age- and sex-adjusted mortality -- death -- risk for patients with implantable cardiac defibrillators.