Psychological Correlates of Anginal Symptom Reporting in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

Psychological Correlates of Angina. This paper reviews the research literature on psychological factors that affect the perception of anginal symptoms among patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Early research in this area established that variables such as anxiety, depression, and somatic preoccupation predict anginal complaints among community samples and patients with CAD. More recent research has focused on the effects of these variables, as well as personality traits, on symptom reporting during actual ischemic episodes. Despite strong evidence of an association between these psychological variables and anginal symptoms, the direction of causality has not been resolved. Furthermore, potentially important interactions between the identified psychological variables and situational or environmental factors remain to be investigated.