PTSD Hinders Sleep after Heart Attack, Increases Risk New research suggests the development of post-traumatic stress disorder after a heart attack may explain why sleep is often impaired in some survivors.


Prior research found that one in eight heart attack survivors suffer PTSD and that survivors with PTSD have a doubled risk of having another cardiac event or of dying within one to three years, compared with survivors without PTSD.

A new study reviews the association of PTSD and sleep in nearly 200 patients who had experienced a heart attack within the previous month.

The study, published in the current issue of Annals of Behavioral Medicine, found that PTSD following a heart attack is associated with poor sleep.

Jonathan A. Shaffer, Ph.D., and colleagues at Columbia’s Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health discovered that the more heart attack-induced PTSD symptoms patients reported, the worse their overall self-reported sleep was in the month following their heart attack.



Shaffer and colleagues hypothesize that the strong association between heart attack-induced PTSD and sleep may be due to the fact that disturbed sleep is a standard characteristic of PTSD. Results of recent treatment studies for PTSD and sleep disturbance suggest that the two conditions should be viewed as occurring together, rather than one being merely a symptom of the other.


Study authors say that further research is needed to better understand the associations of PTSD due to heart attack, poor sleep and risk for future heart attacks.

Source: Columbia University Medical Center