Psychological distress and risk of peripheral vascular disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm, and heart failure: pooling of sixteen cohort studies.

Objectives: Examine the little-tested relation of psychological distress with peripheral vascular disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm, and heart failure.

Methods: Pooling of raw data from 166,631 male and female participants in 16 UK-based cohort studies. Psychological distress was measured using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Peripheral vascular disease, abdominal aortic aneurysm, and heart failure events were based on death register linkage.

Results: During a mean follow-up 9.5 years there were 17,368 deaths of which 8625 were cardiovascular disease-related. Relative to the asymptomatic group (0 score), the highly distressed group (score 7-12) experienced an elevated risk of peripheral vascular disease (adjusted hazard ratio; 95% confidence interval: 3.39; 1.97, 5.82) and heart failure (1.76; 1.37, 2.26). Psychological distress was weakly related to the risk of death from abdominal aortic aneurysm. As anticipated, distress was associated with cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and all strokes combined.

Conclusions: In the present study, we provide new evidence of mental health-related cardiovascular disease presentations.