Postcardiotomy Psychosis in Non-English-Speaking Patients

Abstract

This paper presents another causative or additive factor in the production of post-cardiotomy delirium. Comparison of two matched groups of patients from the National Heart Institute reveals a marked difference in the incidence of psychosis between the group that is from the United States and speaks English and the group that is foreign and has no ability to communicate in English. The United States group had two patients with psychosis (3.9 percent), while the foreign group had fifteen (29.4 percent) (p<0.001). A higher incidence of delirium occurred in men than women, and there was suggestive evidence that the group with psychoses had more medical complications, with resulting delays in discharge. The importance of language and culture in the determination of this delirium are considered and methods of mitigating this reaction are presented.

Delirium after cardiac surgery: A critical review

“…Only 2 pairs of studies [30/32 and 41/44] used well-defined criteria, from which the most adequate ones were chosen for further examination [30,44]. Six studies that used selected patient samples or samples gathered both retrospectively and prospectively were excluded [15,21,24,29,47,56]. This yielded a total of 16 prospective [6,10,17,19,22,23,30,33,36,39,40,42,44,45,53,55] and 3 retrospective [8,40,46] studies for further research and analysis of the overall incidence of postcardiotomy delirium and possible risk factors.…”

Coming out of Intensive Care Crazy: Dreams of Affliction

“…Most studies of the syndrome are clinically isolated studies of practitioners' own units, some have researched the syndrome from medical records only, many studies have made no prior assessment of patients' mental well-being, few rely on extensive longitudinal sampling, and few involve patients of ethnic minorities. Danilowicz and Gabriel (1980) argue that non-English people have high rates of ICS; studies also differ on the range of behavior to be included under ICS.…”