REVIEW: ANXIETY AND QUALITY OF LIFE IN PATIENTS WITH MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION
ABSTRACT: Anxiety and reduced
Quality of Life (QoL) are commonly reported in patients with myocardial
infarction (MI) for long years and has a great interest to improve patients’
quality of life. Almost all of the patients with MI will have anxiety to some
level. Persistent anxiety for long period has detrimental effect on quality of
life. Therefore this study is aimed to find out the effect of anxiety on
quality of life of patients with MI.
Methods: Published literatures were searched using individual or
combination of keywords: anxiety, quality of life and myocardial infarction in
following databases: PubMed, CIHNAL, Proquest, and Google Scholar. The full
texts were obtained from the journal homepage using Prince of Songkla
University and those that could not be accessed from this University were
obtained from the University of Tokyo network. Papers which were not accessible
from these two networks were excluded from the review.
Results: Majority of studies found that patients with MI reported high
level of anxiety persisting over months to years affecting QoL. Some studies
showed that anxiety was associated with complications and all of the study
showed that anxiety was associated with decreased quality of life. Different
studies measured anxiety and quality of life differently which might have
affect the results of the studies and most of the studies did not consider it
and lack to correlate the level of anxiety in each dimension of QoL is noted.
High level of anxiety was correlated with the poorer quality of life.
Therefore, the researcher should note that which level of anxiety the patient
is suffering from because mild anxiety is helpful to focus attention; to learn
the stressful situation and solve the problems to protect him/her by
themselves. Moderate level of anxiety reduces the patient’s concentration but
facilitates to seek information and solve problems with assistance. Severe
anxiety results in difficulties in thinking and reasoning and disturbs
physiological functioning. Therefore, it is equally important to consider the
correlation between mild, moderate anxiety to QoL.
Conclusion: Anxiety affects negatively in QoL in patients with MI.
Identification of the level of anxiety can help plan effective nursing
management of MI patients.
Author: Bimala Panthee,
Charuwan Kritpracha
Journal Code: jpkeperawatangg110009