Cardiovascular Diseases: Psychological Risk Factors

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a chronic medical condition that affects many aspects of patients' lives. Therefore, it is important to identify risk factors of CVD for the design of interventional and preventive programs. The purpose of this study was to review the psychological risk factors of CVD.

Materials and Methods:

 This systematic review study examines the psychological risk factors of CVD. For this purpose, articles from 1995 to 2019 were searched from the databases of Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus and Elsevier. Out of 257 articles, 51 articles were finally used in this study.

The results of this study showed that various factors such as stress, depression, anger and hostility, lack of social support, anxiety, lack of spiritual health and personality traits such as type A personality in the development of CVD is involved.

According to the findings of the study, health professionals can prevent and control of CVD in different age groups by designing educational programs focused on risk factors of this disease such as stress, depression, anger, social isolation and anxiety.