Cortisol and vital exhaustion in relation to significant coronary artery stenosis in middle-aged women with acute coronary syndrome

Depression and 24-hour urinary cortisol in medical outpatients with coronary heart disease: The Heart and Soul Study

“…Elevated cortisol levels have been associated not only with depression but also coronary disease (Koertge et al 2002;Troxler et al 1977); we did not observe a cross-sectional association between cortisol and worse cardiac disease severity, however. One potential reason for the differences between our study and those demonstrating a link between cortisol and coronary atherosclerosis is that we did not use angiographic or carotid ultrasound measurements to determine level of atherosclerosis.…”

DOES TWO-YEAR STABILITY FOR SCALE SCORES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS DIFFER BY SOCIOECONOMIC POSITION?1

“…Vital exhaustion in our data generated an alpha of .94 which also corresponds to earlier findings for this instrument: .87 (Raikkonen, Hautanen, & Keltikangas-Jarvinen, 1994) and .93 (Koertge et al, 2002).…”

“…The questionnaire includes questions on fatigue, irritability, depressed affect, and personal accomplishment, and a typical item is "I sometimes feel that my body is like a battery that is losing its power". The item subset used in the Life conditions, Stress, and Health study has been validated by Koertge, Al-Khalili, Ahnve, Janszky, Svane, & Schenck-Gustafsson (2002). Response alternatives were on a 3-step Likert scale with a sum score range of 19-57 where 57 is considered complete exhaustion.…”

Cortisol, Testosterone, and Coronary Heart Disease

“…Cortisol is the potential mediator between stress and cardiovascular disease that has been most discussed in the literature. Four small crosssectional studies suggested that early-morning plasma cortisol levels correlate with the degree of coronary artery disease detected on angiograms, [43][44][45][46] but 2 studies failed to find this association. 45,47,48 There is limited additional evidence from studies comparing poorly characterized groups of patients with various diseases (including cardiovascular disease) with subjects without these diseases, which suggests that blood cortisol levels may be related to cardiovascular disease.…”