Psychological traumas and cardiovascular disease: a controlled study

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are currently regarded as the leading cause of death in the world. Hence it is necessary to outline prevention strategies that take into account the risk factors involved in their development. Adverse childhood experiences are well-known to play an important role in increasing psychological and physical distress in adulthood, but currently there is little evidence about the impact these experiences would have in the development of CVDs. The aim of the present study was to verify the association between traumatic experiences and the onset of the CVDs. It was hypothesized that patients with CVDs would report more childhood traumas and that this association would be stronger in women than men. For the clinical group, 75 patients (20 women) with a first-time diagnosis of CVD carried out by the Cardiology Unit of the San Paolo hospital (Milan) were enrolled in the study. For the control group, 84 healthy participants (48 women) were randomly recruited from the general population. The Traumatic Experience Checklist was administered to assess the traumatic events. The analyses of variance and the planned comparisons performed showed that the clinical group reported a significant higher number and impact of childhood trauma compared to the control group. Moreover, the women of the clinical group showed more childhood traumatic experiences compared to the men of the same group and to the women of the control group. These findings highlight the role of childhood traumatic experiences as risk factors for CVDs in adulthood, particularly in women. These results have important implications for clinical practice, underlining the need of adopting an integrated approach in patient care through intervention and prevention strategies that take into account the psychological risk factors.