psychological predictors of coronary heart diseases: the role of personality factors, stressful life events and perceived quality of social support

aim and background: it is estimated that coronary heart diseases (chd) will be the major cause of mortality by the year 2020. the traditional factors such as age, genetics, smoking and obesity, account only half of the variance in chd.  therefore, regarding increasing concern about the psychosocial factors, the purpose of present study was to evaluate the role of personality, stress and social support in predicting chd. methods and materials: in this correlative study, patients with chd referred to shahid rajaee cardiology hospital for cardiac angiography through winter 2008 to spring 2009 in tehran, were selected by convenience sampling method. 150 age, gender, marital status and education matched healthy individuals from families of patients were selected as control group. the inclusion criteria included absence of acute conditions such as the need for surgery, having had the willingness and ability to cooperate. data collected using the neo-ffi personality questionnaire, pickle's stressful life events scale and pierce's social relation quality scale. obtained data analyzed by logistic regression method. findings: studied psychosocial variables predicted 51.9- 69.2 % of chd variance. the classification accuracy (patient and healthy) which was performed by cardiologist based on psychosocial variables was 84.3%, with 82% and 86.7% predicting accuracy for illness and healthiness. neuroticism, extroversion, stress and interpersonal conflicts had a positive correlation with illness and a negative correlation with healthiness, but conscientiousness and openness to experience had positive correlation with illness and negative correlation with healthiness. conclusions: in general, it seems that psychosocial factors specially personality, stress and social support have an important role in predicting chd.