Abstract Body: Introduction: Women and men may recover from myocardial infarction (MI) differently. Resilience promotes psychological recovery post-MI but its association with health status, including health-related quality of life, angina frequency, and physical limitations, has been underexplored.
Hypothesis: We hypothesized that higher resilience would be associated with better post-MI health status, and that this relationship would be stronger among women compared to men.
Methods: We analyzed a cross-sectional sample of adult participants in the Heart Attack Research Program, a longitudinal study of adults post-MI. Resilience was measured with the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), range 0-6, and dichotomized to low (BRS score <3) and normal/high (BRS score ≥ 3) resilience. We used Wilcoxon rank-sum tests to assess differences in scores of overall health status (Seattle Angina Questionnaire [SAQ-7]) and its 3 domains – angina frequency (SAQ-AF), physical limitations (SAQ-PL), and quality of life (SAQ-QL), by resilience group. We used multivariable linear regression to examine the association between SAQ scores and resilience. Covariates included age, sex (except in sex-stratified analyses), race, ethnicity, BMI, history of diabetes, hypertension, or hypercholesterolemia, and prior history of MI.
Results: The study sample included 161 participants, 38% female, 76% white, with a mean age of 63±13 years. Median time from MI to data collection was 37 days, interquartile range [IQR 21-59 days]. Median SAQ7 score was 75 [IQR 57-89], and 19% of participants reported low resilience. Wilcoxon rank-sum tests showed significant differences in SAQ7, SAQ-QL, and SAQ-AF scores among those with low vs normal/high resilience, p=0.002, p=0.001, p=0.006, respectively, but not in SAQ-PL scores (Figure 1). After full adjustment, SAQ7 and SAQ-QL scores were positively associated with resilience (β 0.21, p=0.01 and β 0.25, p=0.003, respectively), but SAQ-AF and SAQ-PL were not (p=0.201 and p=0.184, respectively). When stratified by sex, the associations between SAQ7 and SAQ-QL, and resilience remained significant among female participants (β 0.33, p=0.036 and β 0.33, p=0.030, respectively), but not among male participants.
Conclusions: Normal/high resilience was associated with better health status and higher health-related quality of life among this post-MI cohort, and particularly among women. Resilience building interventions may be considered as strategies to improve post-MI recovery.