Tropical Medicine & Surgery

Abstract

An Epidemiological Study on the Occurrence of Depression Among the Patients with Cardiovascular Disorders Admitted in a Tertiary Care Hospital in India

Pradip Kumar Ghosal, Saibal Das, Sanjib Bandyopadhyay and Somnath Mondal

Background: Depression and stress related events impose a major toll in patients with cardiovascular disorders. It is essential to diagnose and treat depression and stress to reduce the incidence and severity of cardiovascular ailments in the tropical regions.
Objective: This epidemiological study aimed to find out the occurrence of depression, and, if any, associated stress related life events among 170 patients with cardiovascular disorders admitted in a tertiary care teaching hospital in India. Different risk factors for the occurrence of depression had also been tried to find out.
Materials and methods: This was a hospital based observational and descriptive type of epidemiological study of sample size n=170 with different inclusion and exclusion criteria. Study tools comprised of General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Self Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ), Stress Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) and bed head tickets of individual patients. Statistical analysis was done with SPSS (version 16) for interpretation of results.
Results: 44.1% patients were found to be suffering from depression with male and middle-age predilection.
Conclusion: A huge proportion of the patients with cardiovascular disorders were suffering from depression. However, there was no statistically significant association of depression with any life related stress factors mentioned. Measures should be taken to create a good doctor-patient relationship, to be able to counsel the patient properly and come to a consensus about the best approach of more detailed clinical analysis, psychological counseling, and drug therapy to minimize the morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular disorders among them.