Heart Disease

A nurse’s observation that taking the time to talk to patients about their treatment might be keeping their heart attack patients alive longer led to an important finding. As recently reported at the Acute Cardiac Care Congress in Madrid, Spain, psychological interventions reduced deaths and cardiovascular events in heart disease patients by half."The nurses on our coronary care unit observed that patients were less likely to have another heart attack, die, or return to hospital when we talked to them about their treatment, played music for them or helped religious patients to say prayers,” said Dr. Zoi Aggelopoulou, a nurse and one of the authors of the study conducted in Athens, Greece.Wanting to pursue the connection further, she and her co-authors conducted a meta-analysis of nine randomized, controlled trials that included more than 6,600 patients. The studies looked at whether psychological interventions improved outcomes of patients with coronary heart disease when combined with...

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