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A history of depression may hurt a heart attack patient's care
By Staff Writer
If a heart attack patient also has a history of depression, he or she may be less likely to receive priority care in an emergency room, according to new Canadian research.
The study, which appears in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, was conducted by researchers from the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences. The research was based off of data on 6,874 heart attack patients who were admitted to 96 acute care hospitals in Ontario between April 2004 and March 2005.
Of these patients, 680 had a history of depression in their medical charts. In addition, 39 percent of these individuals were assigned a low priority triage score by the emergency department compared to the 32.7 percent of heart attack patients without the emotional disorder.
As low priority patients, there were delays in the diagnosis and treatment of these individuals. A possible reason for this is that emergency staff may assume that these patients' symptoms are the result of anxiety, rather than a heart attack, according to the researchers.
Emergency staff try to identify the cause of a patient's symptoms since less than 10 percent of those who come to emergency rooms reporting chest pains and shortness of breath are actually suffering from a heart attack.
