ArticleLong-term mental health of women after a first acute myocardial infarction1☆,
Section snippets
participants
Sixty-two Israeli women with a documented first AMI who were admitted into any of 8 medical centers in central Israel participated. The medical, sociodemographic, and psychologic characteristics of these women are described in table 2. The characteristics were compared with those of a sample of men 5 years after a first AMI that were reported by Drory et al.13 Women differed from men to a statistically significant degree in age, ethnic background, lack of a permanent partner, concomitant
Results
Table 3 presents the means and standard deviations (SDs) of the psychologic well-being and the psychologic distress levels for the 62 women 5 years after an AMI. These means and SDs were compared with the means and SDs of 209 men 5 years after AMI who were taken from the study of Drory et al13 and with the means and SDs of a normative community sample of 151 women between the ages of 35 and 65 years. Data for the normative sample were taken from a study of the psychometric properties of the MHI
Discussion
The present study’s findings suggest that women with an AMI are more likely than men to experience a reduction in their mental health status. Five years after AMI, women reported less psychologic well-being and more psychologic distress than that experienced by men and by a normative community sample of women. In a previous study with a sample of men 5 years after AMI,13 no statistically significant difference was found between the psychologic well-being of those men and the psychologic
Conclusion
Despite the above limitations, the study indicates that women after a first AMI have a decreased mental health status when compared with men. However, research that considers the above limitations is necessary to determine the extent to which the gender differences in personal and social resources, and in the long-term psychosocial adjustment to an AMI uncovered in this study, reflect differences in the physical, psychologic, and social condition of women and men. Surveys of the use of
Acknowledgements
We thank Dov Har-Even and Yoav Bilinski for their assistance in statistical analysis and database management. The following investigators and institutions participated in the Israel Study Group on First Acute Myocardial Infarction. Principal investigator: Yaacov Drory, MD, Cardiac Rehabilitation Institute, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv; Yeheskiel Kishon, MD, Michael Kriwisky, MD, and Yoseph Rosenman, MD, Wolfson Medical
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Supported in part by the Chief Scientist, Israel Ministry of Health; the National Insurance Institute; the Administrator General, Israel Ministry of Justice; the Committee for Research and Prevention in Occupational Safety and Health, Israel Ministry of Labor and Welfare; the Tel-Aviv University Research Fund; and the Edith and Israel Pollak Foundation, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
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