The matched pairs were an average of 58.2 years old and had similar health behaviors and health conditions. Ninety-five percent of the people who experienced cardiovascular events were male.
Among the matched pairs, 4,876 — 1.8 percent — experienced a new onset of depression during the study period. But the number was higher among the spouses of people who had a cardiovascular event, an association that endured when researchers took age, sex, spouse’s age, income and other demographic factors into account.
Overall, the spouses of people who had cardiovascular events had a 13 to 14 percent higher depression risk than their counterparts. Those whose spouses had a stroke or heart failure were at higher risk than those whose spouses had a heart attack.
The large sample size and statistical methods fill a knowledge gap about the mental health of spouses of people with poor heart health, the researchers write. Spouses must contend with an increased caregiving burden, financial costs, grief and stigma when their partners have cardiovascular events, they note. They call for comprehensive primary care for such spouses, better collaboration between cardiologists and psychiatrists, and more support within communities.
Future research should go beyond spouses to family members and other caretakers, write two Chinese public health experts in an editorial published concurrently in JAMA Network Open. They say the study should prompt readers to consider both caregivers’ resilience and coping mechanisms after such events.
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