Monday, October 19, 2009

PTSD raises death risk after surgery

People who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have an increased risk of dying after surgery - even if the trauma they suffered happened many years beforehand. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco studied 1,792 male veterans, who had major, non-cardiac, non-emergency surgery between 1998 and 2008. 129 of them had PTSD. The veterans with PTSD were more likely to have risk factors for heart disease but even after taking this and high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking and depression into account they were still 2.2x more likely to die within a year of surgery.

You can find out more about this research at

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=news&id=122940&cn=109

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