The Syndrome of Vital Exhaustion and Depression and Its Relationship to Coronary Heart Disease

Abstract

It is well known that many coronary patients report that they felt tired before the onset of myocardial infarction. Those feelings are often accompanied by general malaise (1). To test the structure and predictive meaning of these feelings, a newly developed questionnaire, the Maastricht Questionnaire (MQ), was included in a prospective study. In this study all patients who visited their general practitioner because of complaints of possible cardiac origin were followed during a period of 10 months in an attempt to study which signs or complaints had a predictive meaning as to the occurrence of myocardial infarction or sudden death. Those who experienced a new coronary event (i.e., sudden death, myocardial infarction, serious deterioration of the cardiac status) had a mean MQ score of 133.41 at intakte (n, 37; s.d., 25.15). The mean score of those who experienced no new coronary event was 123.17 (n, 345; s.d., 26.01). The mean score of a healthy control group was 98.42 (n, 317; s.d., 18.42); all differences were significant (2, 3).