One of every five people who suffer a heart attack gets severely depressed. While that may seem unsurprising―certainly a brush with mortality, being rushed to the hospital and having to take a bucketful of medications could throw anyone for a loop―there's growing evidence to suggest that something more complicated is going on. Men and women who have clinical depression, for example, are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack later on, while coronary patients who become severely depressed are three times as likely to develop further heart problems or die. Yet doctors often seem reluctant to treat depression in their heart-attack patients for fear that anti-depressant drugs might interfere with the lifesaving benefits of cardiac medications.
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