Poor Sleep Post Heart Attack Associated with PTSD

The link between poor sleep and heart diseases is well-known. A new study shows that people who get poor sleep after a heart attack display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Previous research on the subject had revealed that PTSD among people with a history of cardiac events was fairly common; one in every eight patients suffers from PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD is a type of anxiety that affects a person after he or she has experienced a traumatic event that involved threat of injury or death.

The new study, by researchers from Columbia University Medical Center, found that poor sleep co-related with the occurrence of PTSD in people who had had a heart attack.

The study was based on data obtained from 200 patients who had suffered from a heart attack in the past 30 days. The patients were being treated at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

Study results showed that severe PTSD symptoms among heart attack patients were linked with greater sleep loss in the past month. PTSD symptoms were linked with shorter sleep duration, poor sleep quality, use of sleeping medications and daytime drowsiness.

Disturbed sleep is a characteristic of PTSD and this may be why heart attack patients in the study were displaying poor sleep, researchers hypothesized.

The study was conducted by Jonathan A. Shaffer, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia's Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health, and is published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

Researchers added that dysregulation of autonomic nervous system associated with PTSD and poor sleep may explain the association between heart attack-induced PTSD and sleep. The autonomic nervous system controls involuntary body functions such as heartbeat and digestion.