Psychological responses to cardiac diagnosis: Changes in illness representations immediately following coronary angiography

Profiling illness perceptions to identify patients at-risk for decline in health status after heart valve replacement

“…Subsequently, four profiles of illness perceptions could be derived and patients were grouped into their profile over time in 'stable negative', 'stable positive', 'changing to negative', and 'changing to positive'. Compared to results from Devcich and colleagues [13] who showed that cardiac patients change their illness perception shortly after coronary angiography, our findings indicate that one year after valve replacement surgery there is a fairly large group of patients with a stable perception of their heart valve disease their illness and a smaller group whose perceptions change after surgery. This leads to the assumption that some patients change their perceptions from negative to positive even without receiving specific illness perception interventions.…”

“…According to the Common-Sense Model of illness representation [12] patients make sense of their symptoms by forming causal attributions about the illness, how long they think it will last, if it can be controlled or cured, and what consequences symptoms will have. Various studies in the past two decades have shown that cardiac patients develop a wide range of illness perceptions [13][14][15] and that these perceptions are associated with disease-related disability [16,17], adherence to medication [18] and recovery [19,20].…”

Cardiac rehabilitation patients' perspectives on the recovery following heart valve surgery: a narrative analysis

“…Patients with heart disease develop a wide range of illness perceptions (Astin & Jones , Devcich et al . ). These are important determinants of such behaviour as treatment adherence and influence health‐related quality of life, depression and functional recovery (Petrie & Weinman ).…”

Seeing what's happening on the inside: Patients' views of the value of diagnostic cardiac computed tomography angiography

“…Psychological responses following diagnostic testing have been observed in studies conducted in a variety of medical testing environments (Lerman et al ., ; Mushlin, Kern, Paris, Lambert, & Williams, ; Mushlin, Mooney, Grow, & Phelps, ; O'Connor, Detsky, Tansey, & Kucharczyk, ; Peel, Parry, Douglas, & Lawton, ). Recent research in advanced cardiac testing settings shows evidence of diagnostic‐dependent effects on the way individuals perceive their illness and their health behaviour responses (Devcich, Ellis, Broadbent, Gamble, & Petrie, ; Devcich, Ellis, Gamble, & Petrie, ). These studies suggest that patients appear to prepare themselves cognitively for an unfavourable diagnostic outcome, perhaps as a pre‐emptive coping strategy.…”