Social support predicts hemodynamic recovery from mental stress in patients with implanted defibrillators.

OBJECTIVE

Emotionally stressful events appear to trigger malignant ventricular arrhythmias and myocardial infarction in cardiac patients. However, the physiological pathways linking psychological stress to arrhythmias and adverse disease outcomes remain incompletely understood. In patients with implanted cardioverter-defibrillators (ICD) we investigated the impact of emotions and social support on cardiovascular recovery from mental stress. The hypothesis tested was that psychosocial resources help to maintain adaptive hemodynamic responses to mental stress.

METHODS

In 55 ICD patients we noninvasively measured hemodynamic and autonomic parameters during two sequentially performed mental stress tests (arithmetic and anger recall tests). The cardiovascular data obtained were associated with results from well-validated psychometric self-rating tests for anxiety and depression (HADS), anger (STAXI), and perceived social support (FSozU).

RESULTS

In the rest period after mental stress application the majority of the study participants (82%) showed a rapid fall in cardiac index, arterial blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as an increase in high-frequency heart rate variability, while the remainder had no or unexpected changes in the hemodynamic parameters examined. Patients missing hemodynamic recovery in the post-stress phase reported significantly less social support than normally reacting patients (P<.05). Multivariate logistic regression models confirm that social support is an independent and significant predictor of preserved hemodynamic recovery from mental stress, even after controlling for somatic confounders (multivariate odds ratio 4.1; 95% confidence interval 1.3-12.7; P=.015).

CONCLUSIONS

Our data indicate that in ICD patients better perceived social support is associated with a more pronounced hemodynamic recovery after mental stress.