Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Patients who need heart surgery are more than twice as likely to have depression compared to the general population. This is a major health concern because heart surgery patients who have depression are more likely to die than those who are not depressed. Antidepressant medications are commonly used to treat depression, but their use in heart surgery patients is questionable. Research suggests that physical activity may be as effective as antidepressants for the treatment of depression. However, it is unknown if physical activity reduces symptoms of depression before and after heart surgery. Therefore, we recruited 436 patients scheduled to have heart surgery at the St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, MB to determine the Impact of Physical Activity on Depression after Cardiac Surgery (IPAD-CS). Our results showed that almost 25% of patients were depressed before surgery. Depression was the highest when patients were discharged from the hospital where almost 40% reported being depressed. Patients who were not physically active were more than twice as likely to have depression before surgery. Only 40% of patients chose to participate in cardiac rehabilitation after surgery. This is a concern because research shows that cardiac rehabilitation not only reduces depressive symptoms, but also reduces a patient's risk of dying by at least 30%. An interesting finding was that patients who were not depressed before surgery, but reported being depressed 6 months after surgery were less physically active than those who were not depressed. Based on our results, depression and physical activity should be monitored in patients before and after heart surgery to inform treatment strategies in these patients.