Mitral valve stenosis can lead to a range of symptoms that affect daily life. As many of the people with this problem are elderly, the difficulties resulting from age can be exacerbated by illness. A pilot descriptive study was designed to examine the differences in anxiety, depression and functional capacity in women with mitral valve stenosis who were aged over 60 years when compared to a similar group of volunteers who did not have any cardiac disease. Measurement was undertaken using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale, the SF-36 Health Status questionnaire and the Functional Limitations Profile. Forty women were recruited to the study: 20 women with mitral valve stenosis and 20 volunteers. Each person was asked to complete the three questionnaires on one occasion only. Non-parametric statistics were used for analysis. Patients fared worse than volunteers with significant differences between groups in respect of anxiety (P = 0.03), depression (P = 0.02) and overall function (P < 0.001), but not in physical (P = 0.52) or mental health (P = 0.32). Future research could focus on strategies that would help alleviate anxiety and depression and improve functional capacity in older women with mitral valve stenosis.
Objective To examine the relationship between the mean of all HbA1c measures after CHF diagnosis and outcome in a large cohort of T2DM patients with incident CHF. Design Retrospective, observational cohort study. Setting Tayside, Scotland. Patients T2DM patients with incident CHF between 1993 and 2010. Measurement A weighted mean HbA1c was calculated using all available HbA1c measures following CHF diagnosis and patients were grouped into five categories of HbA1c (#6%, >6e#7%, >7e#8%, >8e#9% and >9%). We subsequently compared diet and drug treated populations. The relationship between mean HbA1c and all-cause deaths after CHF diagnosis was assessed. Results 795 patients with T2DM met study criteria. Median followup of 3.8 years saw 491 (61.8%) deaths. Cox regression model, adjusted for all other significant predictors, with the middle HbA1c category (>7e#8%) as the reference, showed a U shaped relationship between HbA1c and outcome. (<6% [HR 95% CI 1.78 (1.26 to 2.52)]; >6e#7% [1.29 (1.01 to 1.66)] and >9% [1.38 (1.03 to 1.84)]. We found a similar relationship in the drug treated subgroup. However in the diet only group, low HbA1c was associated with the lowest risk of death (#7% [0.17 (0.07 to 0.39)]). Conclusions In patients with T2DM and CHF, our observational study shows that in drug treated patients there was a U shaped relationship between HbA1c and mortality with the lowest mortality risk in patients with modest glycaemic control (HbA1c, >7e#9%). However in diet treated patients, lower HbA1c was associated with lower mortality risk.
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