1. Epidemiology and Global Health
  2. Medicine

Health: Understanding the links between cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions

Individuals recently diagnosed with a cardiovascular disease are at higher risk of developing a mental illness, with mortality increasing when both conditions are present.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84524
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  1. Sonali Amarasekera
  2. Prabhat Jha
(2022)
Health: Understanding the links between cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions
eLife 11:e84524.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84524
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  1. Sonali Amarasekera
  2. Prabhat Jha  Is a corresponding author
  1. Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Epidemiology Division, University of Toronto, Canada
  2. Centre for Global Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Canada

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality worldwide, accounting for approximately 32% of all deaths globally. Mental illnesses are similarly common, with approximately one in every eight individuals living with a mental health disorder in 2019 (World Health Organization, 2022). Given their high prevalence, these conditions are likely to exist alongside each other and this co-occurrence warrants rigorous scientific investigation.

The relationship between heart disease and mental illness is complex and bidirectional. For example, being diagnosed with heart failure can understandably cause stress and despair, and consequently elevate an individual’s risk of developing a major depressive disorder (Hare et al., 2014). Conversely, depressive disorders are known to manifest as sleep disturbances, reduced levels of physical activity and difficulty following health recommendations — all factors linked to an increased likelihood of developing cardiovascular conditions.

Evidence exists that the risks for mental and cardiovascular diseases increase in tandem (Schöttke and Giabbiconi, 2015; Ziegelstein, 2001). However, this body of work has important limitations that hinder drawing meaningful conclusions. For example, some studies only capture patient information at a single point in time, making it difficult to establish whether it was the cardiovascular or the psychiatric condition which appeared first in individuals with both illnesses (Almhdawi et al., 2021). In addition, research in this area has mainly focused on the relationship between cardiovascular health and depression or generalized anxiety disorder, with little attention paid to other psychiatric conditions such as psychosis and bipolar disorder. Lastly, no studies have so far adequately accounted for family-related mechanisms that may be driving any observed associations, such as certain genetic backgrounds or early childhood environments. Now, in eLife, Unnur Valdimarsdóttir, Qing Shen and colleagues report the results of a study designed to address some of these limitations (Shen et al., 2022).

The team (who are based in China, the United States, Iceland and Sweden) used the Swedish Patient Register to identify nearly 0.9 million individuals recently diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, and with no prior history of psychiatric disorders. Throughout the study period, these patients were then followed until they first received a mental health diagnosis within the study period. In addition, the study included a remarkable family-comparison design, whereby participants’ siblings who had no mental health or cardiovascular conditions at the time of the diagnosis were also tracked over time. The risk of developing any psychiatric condition in both patients and siblings could therefore be compared. This approach allowed Shen et al. to control for familial factors that are often difficult to measure and, if left unaccounted for in study design, could contribute to a spurious association between cardiovascular disorders and subsequent mental illness.

The results indicate that, compared to their unaffected siblings, study participants were 2.7 times more at risk of developing a psychiatric disorder within a year of having received their diagnoses of cardiovascular illness (even after accounting for familial factors, prior history of psychiatric illness and sociodemographic variables such as age, sex or socioeconomic status). Similar associations were observed when study participants were compared to non-sibling controls. In addition, individuals who developed a psychiatric disorder during that first year had a 55% increased risk of dying from a heart-related condition compared to patients who retained good mental health. In this cohort, the co-occurrence of any mental illness therefore negatively impacted the course of cardiovascular diseases.

Despite its strengths, this work also has some limitations. Notably, smoking behaviour and alcohol consumption were not adequately controlled for, despite being directly and independently associated with cardiovascular disease and mental illnesses (Dani and Harris, 2005; Mukamal, 2006). Not accounting for either of these lifestyle factors could overestimate the true relationship between these two conditions. In addition, various psychiatric subtypes with distinct phenotypes were combined — for example, all types of anxiety conditions, from generalized anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder, were merged into a single mental health outcome. Each of these disorders is likely to have specific associations with cardiovascular health, which could not be captured by this experimental design.

The work by Shen et al. highlights how important it is to monitor psychiatric symptoms while treating cardiovascular diseases. Their findings should encourage the scientific community to fill existing knowledge gaps. In particular, it is becoming increasingly clear that evidence derived from high-income countries, where most research is conducted, cannot be directly translated to other settings. For instance, age-standardized mortality rates for cardiovascular disease are mostly decreasing in European and North American populations, while suicide mortality (as an indicator of mental health burdens) rises with age. By contrast, cardiac mortality rates are rising in certain low- and middle-income countries such as Mexico and India, with suicide mortality occurring at younger ages (Reynales-Shigematsu et al., 2018; Ke et al., 2018; World Health Organization, 2022; Phillips and Cheng, 2012). Context-specific data will therefore need to be collected for cardiovascular diseases to be appropriately managed across the world through integrated healthcare approaches.

References

    1. Mukamal KJ
    (2006)
    The effects of smoking and drinking on cardiovascular disease and risk factors
    Alcohol Research & Health 29:199–202.

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Author details

  1. Sonali Amarasekera

    Sonali Amarasekera is in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Epidemiology Division, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2699-7780

  2. Prabhat Jha

    Prabhat Jha is at the Centre for Global Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    For correspondence
    Prabhat.jha@utoronto.ca
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7067-8341

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© 2022, Amarasekera and Jha

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  1. Sonali Amarasekera
  2. Prabhat Jha
(2022)
Health: Understanding the links between cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions
eLife 11:e84524.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84524

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Research organism

    1. Related to

    Cardiovascular disease and subsequent risk of psychiatric disorders: a nationwide sibling-controlled study

    Qing Shen, Huan Song ... Unnur Valdimarsdóttir

Further reading

    1. Epidemiology and Global Health
    2. Medicine

    Cardiovascular disease and subsequent risk of psychiatric disorders: a nationwide sibling-controlled study

    Qing Shen, Huan Song ... Unnur Valdimarsdóttir
    Research Article Updated

    Background:

    The association between cardiovascular disease (CVD) and selected psychiatric disorders has frequently been suggested while the potential role of familial factors and comorbidities in such association has rarely been investigated.

    Methods:

    We identified 869,056 patients newly diagnosed with CVD from 1987 to 2016 in Sweden with no history of psychiatric disorders, and 910,178 full siblings of these patients as well as 10 individually age- and sex-matched unrelated population controls (N = 8,690,560). Adjusting for multiple comorbid conditions, we used flexible parametric models and Cox models to estimate the association of CVD with risk of all subsequent psychiatric disorders, comparing rates of first incident psychiatric disorder among CVD patients with rates among unaffected full siblings and population controls.

    Results:

    The median age at diagnosis was 60 years for patients with CVD and 59.2% were male. During up to 30 years of follow-up, the crude incidence rates of psychiatric disorder were 7.1, 4.6, and 4.0 per 1000 person-years for patients with CVD, their siblings and population controls. In the sibling comparison, we observed an increased risk of psychiatric disorder during the first year after CVD diagnosis (hazard ratio [HR], 2.74; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.62–2.87) and thereafter (1.45; 95% CI, 1.42–1.48). Increased risks were observed for all types of psychiatric disorders and among all diagnoses of CVD. We observed similar associations in the population comparison. CVD patients who developed a comorbid psychiatric disorder during the first year after diagnosis were at elevated risk of subsequent CVD death compared to patients without such comorbidity (HR, 1.55; 95% CI, 1.44–1.67).

    Conclusions:

    Patients diagnosed with CVD are at an elevated risk for subsequent psychiatric disorders independent of shared familial factors and comorbid conditions. Comorbid psychiatric disorders in patients with CVD are associated with higher risk of cardiovascular mortality suggesting that surveillance and treatment of psychiatric comorbidities should be considered as an integral part of clinical management of newly diagnosed CVD patients.

    Funding:

    This work was supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action Grant (CoMorMent, grant no. 847776 to UV, PFS, and FF), Grant of Excellence, Icelandic Research Fund (grant no. 163362-051 to UV), ERC Consolidator Grant (StressGene, grant no. 726413 to UV), Swedish Research Council (grant no. D0886501 to PFS), and US NIMH R01 MH123724 (to PFS).