Introduction: Heart Failure is a chronic disease that requires permanent treatment.In patients with heart failure, anxiety and depression have been relatively ignored by researchers. Depression and anxiety have a major influence on social interaction and psychological function in patients with HF.
Objective: Study endpoints included determination of quality of life scores according to the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure questionnaire and quantifying the parameters of psychological stress related to anxiety and depression using HAD score the anxiety-depres-sion.
Methods: The retrospective study included 31 patients with HF.The protocol included:clinical evaluation, bio-chemical analysis, echocardiography, determination of quality of life scores according to the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure questionnaire and HADS anxiety-depression questionnaire.The Minnesota questionna-ire includes 21 questions about how much is affected by HF patient’s life over the past 4 weeks.The patient is asked to encircle the number from 1-5 next to each qu-estion to indicate how much his life was affected, 1-very low degree of damage to life and number 5-to very high damage.If the patient is not affected at all it surrounds „0” after this question. Self-assessment HAD scale consists of 14 items and two subscales of 7 items each for depression and anxiety.
Results: It was found a significant difference between the severity of cardiac insufficiency at hospitalization versus that at discharge (p=0.0001) There was a signifi-cant decrease in the severity of heart failure at 6 months compared with the inclusion in the study at 5 patients who had NYHA III at hospitalization and NYHA II at discharge. There was a significant correlation between NYHA class and anxiety-depression overall batch sco-res, as p<0.011 for HAD A score and p<0.033 for HAD D score.The results of the study demonstrated a signi-ficant correlation between HAD-A and LDL-c scores. Regarding the association between the NYHA class and the Minnesota score after 6 months, was obtained a p=0.031 level, statistically significant.
Conclusions: Heart failure prevention is an important public health purpose. Depression and anxiety have a major influence on social interaction and psychologi-cal function in patients with HF. The results obtained in this study suggest that behavioral and psychologi-cal stress responses in patients with heart failure have a very important role in the prognosis and course of the disease. Patients with high scores on both Minne-sota questionnaire and both HADS anxiety-depression questionnaire should be introduced in psychological rehabilitation programs, in addition to functional re-covery.