Poster Presentation
Friday, 21 July 2006
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Friday, 21 July 2006
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM
This presentation is part of : Poster Presentations III
Gender, Depression and Symptom Expression in a Cardiac Population
Heather Hiscox, MPH, Claire Venker, BS, and Shu-Fen Wung, PhD, MS, RN. College of Nursing, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Learning Objective #1: identify the impact of depressive symptom expression on symptom presentation of cardiac patients.
Learning Objective #2: identify the most common symptoms of cardiac patients that report depressive symptoms by age and gender
The purpose of this study is to determine how cardiac symptom presentation varies by gender and by level of depressive symptoms.     
Methods: This sub-analysis included 461 subjects with suspected myocardial infarction enrolled in a prospective study.  The analysis included subjects under age 65 that completed the Beck Depression Inventory.  Depressive symptoms were defined as a score of ≥10.  Chi-square tests were used to determine whether symptom presentation varied between subjects with and without depressive symptoms and by gender.  Only those symptoms with a frequency of 10% or greater were reported.  Subjects were asked to indicate which words from a list of symptom descriptors matched their experience prior to their hospital visit.  Results: Men with depressive symptoms were more likely than those without to report pain (p=0.005), vise-like (p=0.017), suffocating (p<0.001), sharp (p=0.006), dizziness (p<0.001), sweating (p=0.002), general weakness (p=0.005), numbness and tingling in the hands (p=0.048), numbness and tingling in the feet (p=0.003), shortness of breath (p=0.001), lightheadedness (p=0.001), leg cramps (p=0.041), fearful or frightened (p=0.003), unusual fatigue/tiredness (p<0.001), headache (p=0.004), anxious/nervous (p=0.025), and hot sensation or flushed (p=0.002).  Women with depressive symptoms were more likely than those without to indicate they felt pressure (p=0.006), pain (p=0.047), discomfort (p=0.042), suffocating (p=0.021), and heaviness (p=0.003), nausea (p=0.001), vomiting (p=0.038), palpitations/funny beating of the heart (p=0.037), leg cramps (p=0.010), unusual fatigue/tiredness (p=0.038), headache (p=0.002), anxious/nervous (p=0.013), and hot sensation or flushed (p=0.020).  Women with depressive symptoms were more likely to report feeling pressure (p=0.023), heaviness (p=0.025), and nausea (p=0.011) than men with depressive symptoms. 
Conclusions:  Men and women with depressive symptoms were more likely than those without to report certain cardiac symptoms. Among those with depressive symptoms, women were more likely than men to report pressure, heaviness and nausea. These differences must be considered when evaluating patients presenting with cardiac symptoms.

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