Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disabling condition that develops consequent to trauma exposure such as natural disasters, sexual assault, automobile accidents, and combat that independently increases risk for early incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cardiovascular (CV) mortality by over 50 % and incident hypertension risk by over 30 %. While the majority of research on PTSD and CVD has concerned initially healthy civilian and military veteran samples, emerging research is also demonstrating that PTSD consequent to the trauma of an acute cardiac event significantly increases risk for early recurrence and mortality and that patient experiences in the clinical pathway that are related to the emergency department environment may provide an opportunity to prevent PTSD onset and thus improve outcomes. Future directions for clinical and implementation science concern broad PTSD and trauma screening in the context of primary care medical environments and the testing of PTSD treatments with CVD-related surrogates and endpoints.

Keywords: Anxiety; Cardiovascular disease; Hypertension; Post-traumatic stress disorder; Stress.