Personality traits and medical outcome of cardiac illness.

Overview

OBJECTIVE: Our goal was to examine the empirical literature on the effect of personality traits on the medical outcome of cardiac illness. METHOD: Pub Med and Psychological Abstracts were searched for the years 1990 to September 2009 using the terms personality, personality traits, personality disorder, health, recovery from illness, cardiac illness and surgical recovery. Articles were then selected that were prospective, had a peer review published measure of personality, a standardized measure of outcome of physical illness and at least one year follow up. RESULTS: Seven articles were identified that met our criteria. All seven had a significant finding that personality traits predicted medical outcomes. Of these seven articles six had similar enough measures of personality to be included in a meta analysis. (All used Type D personality.) Meta analysis found an odds ratio of 3.76 for Type D personality traits predicting poorer medical outcome. This indicated that patients with Type D personality had a 276% increase in the odds of a poor medical outcome compared to patients without Type D personality. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate that personality traits are a strong predictor of medical outcome of cardiac disease.