WEDNESDAY, Feb. 19, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Heart attack patients with a history of mental illness or substance abuse who are treated at Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers receive care equal to that of other heart attack patients.
That's what a study in the February issue of Health Services Research found.
Previous research on the treatment of mentally ill people in non-VA health systems has shown that people with mental illness receive poorer care than people with no mental illness. The research has also indicated that mentally ill people treated in non-VA health systems have higher death rates for several conditions, including heart attack.
The new study was led by Dr. Laura A. Petersen, of the VA's Houston Center for Quality of Care and Utilization Studies and Baylor College of Medicine.
Petersen and her colleagues from Yale and Harvard analyzed the records of 4,340 people who received care for heart attack at 81 VA hospitals in 1994 and 1995. About 20 percent of those people had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression or other mental illnesses, or had been treated for substance abuse.
All the patients, regardless of their mental health or substance abuse history, were equally likely to receive medications shown to increase survival after heart attack.
The study found patients in both groups who received diagnostic angiography X-rays of the heart or blood vessels were equally likely to receive angioplasty or coronary artery bypass surgery. Both treatments help restore blood flow to the heart.
The researchers did find there was a slightly lower rate of diagnostic angiography among the mentally ill heart attack patients, both during their initial hospital stay and within 90 days of follow-up when the patients were at VA hospitals or private hospitals that accept Medicare.
The study found that while both groups of patients had equal survival rates for 90 days following a heart attack, the patients with mental illness were slightly more likely to die within a year after a heart attack. However, this difference did not reach statistical significance.
More information
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