Background: The importance of psychosocial factors in the development and expression of cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been debated; an extensive recent literature now establishes that psychosocial factors contribute significantly to the pathogenesis of CVD and need to be considered in the risk stratification and treatment of patients with CVD.
Objective: To find out the psychiatric correlates of CVDs. For this, sets of psychological inventories are used, which measure seven psychological variables.
Materials and Methods: To simplify the work, two types of group comparison were made. In the first type, the total sample (450) was divided into three groups, that is, CVD group (350), noncardiac group (50), and normal group (50). In the second type, the CVD group was further divided into seven groups (50 each) based on the diagnosis and was compared with the noncardiac and normal groups.
Result: It was found that cardiac subgroups have similarities and dissimilarities among themselves. Cardiac subgroup showed some similarities with the normal and noncardiac groups as well. Findings indicated that the cardiac group obtained higher scores in family stress, personal stress, extroversionintroversion, neuroticism, and depression and lower scores in social stress when compared with the normal and noncardiac groups.
Conclusion: Higher scores in family stress, personal stress, extroversionintroversion, neuroticism, and depression are the important variables to predict an individual to have the tendency of CVDs. Involvement of psychological factors in CVDs is true, not a myth.
Key words: Cardiovascular disease, stress, depression, extroversionintroversion, neuroticism
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