Clyde Boyce has been hospitalized 14 times in the past four years. This article from CNN details the delays he faced in getting his disability payments.
Boyce, 61, survived two strokes and five operations to unblock arteries around his heart, including three procedures in which doctors propped open his blood vessels with stents. He takes 18 pills a day and gets injections every two weeks with a powerful drug to lower cholesterol.
Yet the disease that came closest to taking Boyce’s life wasn’t a heart condition. It was depression, which led him to attempt suicide twice in the year after his first surgery.
One in 5 people hospitalized for a heart attack or chest pain develop major depression — about four times the rate in the general population, according to the American Heart Association. One in 3 stroke survivors become depressed, along with up to half of those who undergo heart bypass surgery.
Heart disease patients who become depressed are twice as likely to die within the following decade as other patients, according to an unpublished study presented in March at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting. Cardiologists are divided about whether to screen heart patients for depression, but many primary care doctors have embraced the idea, said Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Both the American Academy of Family Physicians and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an expert panel that advises Congress on health care, now recommend that doctors screen all adults for depression. The family physician group also singles out heart attack survivors for depression screening.
Studies increasingly suggest that the most effective care comes from addressing physical and mental health conditions together, rather than forcing frail patients to make separate trips to a variety of specialists, Duckworth said.
Successful approaches have involved “packages of care,” rather than individual services, said Dr. Bruce Rollman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
The team approach is key. Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/20/health/depression-heart-attack-survivor-partner/index.html