Palm Trees

Depression Can Inhibit Rehabilitation for Women with Heart Disease

True depression can be a debilitating disease, impacting a person and those around them. When depression is current in a patient dealing with physical problems, recovery can be a challenge. For those with coronary heart disease, it can be life threatening.

A recent post in Science Daily found that symptoms of depression actually improved among those with coronary heart disease when they participated in a motivationally-enhanced cardiac rehabilitation program that was designed exclusively for women.

According to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2009, depression can co-occur with heart disease and is more often found in women with the heart disease than in men. Depression can also inhibit adherence to lifestyle changes and the willingness to attend rehabilitation.

"Women often don't have the motivation to attend cardiac rehab particularly if they're depressed," said Theresa Beckie, Ph.D., lead investigator and author of the study and professor at the University of South Florida's College of Nursing in Tampa, Florida.

"Historically women have not been socialized to exercise and their attendance in cardiac rehabilitation programs has been consistently poor over the last several decades. This poor attendance may be partly due to mismatches in stages of readiness for behavior change with the health professional approaching from an action-oriented perspective and the women merely contemplating change -- this is destined to evoke resistance."

A clinical trial compared multiple physiological and psychosocial outcomes of women who participated in a 12-week program. Depressive symptoms of 225 women who completed the trial were examined after the intervention and in a six-month follow-up.

Depression scores for the women participating in the traditional cardiac rehab dropped from 16.5 to 14.3 in 12 weeks. For those in the augmented group, their scores dropped from 17.3 to 11.0 – a significant decline compared to the traditional