Level of anxiety and its correlation with some individual characteristics in patients with myocardial infarction in hospitals related to Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Branch (2005-2006)

The most important factors of anxiety in individuals are diseases and their treatment. Although anxiety is an alerting process, it can affect quality of life or makes the treatment longer. This study was performed to determine the relationship between level of anxiety and some of individual characteristics in patients with myocardial infarction (MI) in hospitals related to Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Unit. This study was performed on 200 patients with MI from 3 hospitals related to Islamic Azad University, Tehran Medical Unit. Data were collected with questionnaires, which were filled by interviews. The questionnaire had two parts: 26 questions about some individual characteristics, and the second part comprised Spill Berger standard criteria including 40 questions about anxiety level. "Content validity" method was used for ascertaining validity and "test-retest" method for reliability of tools. The subjects were all in the age range of 22-34 years with a mean of 25.98. Results indicated that 76.5% of study population was married, 64% had a history of hospitalization due to other causes, and 33% knew about their stress and anxiety. On the basis of total anxiety scores (TAS), 8% of individuals had mild (40-79), 47.5% had moderate (80-119), and 44.5% had severe (120-160) anxiety. There were a direct and statistically significant relationship between the level of anxiety and age, gender, marriage status, occupation, job satisfaction, number of children, adequacy of income, site of living, insurance, living conditions, level of liking their visitors, relationship with other family members, anxiety background among the first degree family members, his/her description of personality, description of family environment, present physical health status, and preference to have information about the illness (P<0.05). There is a direct and statistically significant relationship between the level of anxiety and individual characteristics of patients with myocardial infarction.