Participants in the first hospital-initiated, low-intensity collaborative care program to treat depression in heart patients showed significant improvements in their depression, anxiety and emotional quality of life after 6 and 12 weeks, researchers report in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal. Depression is a common condition in cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients which can result in poor prognosis and quality of life. 

Collaborative care depression management programs use a non-physician care manager to coordinate depression evaluation and treatment among the patient, primary medical physician and a psychiatrist.

In their trial, researchers randomized 175 depressed heart patients (mostly Caucasian and about half women) to either "usual care" (a recommendation for depressive treatment) or "collaborative care," which includes receiving written and verbal education about depression and its impact on cardiac disease, scheduling pleasurable leisure activities post-discharge, receiving detailed treatment options (medicines or counseling referral), and coordinating follow-up care after discharge.

"Collaborative care depression-management programs have been used in the outpatient setting, but such a program had never been initiated in the hospital or used for patients with a wide range of cardiac illnesses," said Jeff C. Huffman, M.D., lead author of the study, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Cardiac Psychiatry Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"In the real world this program would be applied on cardiac floors and would be much more easily applied to a large group of patients rather than a small subset or single diagnosis," said Huffman. "This kind of economy of scale may make it much more feasible from a resource and cost standpoint."