Oasis for Mind and Heart

An Initiative for Educating Heart and Mind

The heart-mind connection.

A clear connection exists between mental health and heart disease, which requires assessment, collaboration with other professionals, and behavioral health interventions. Psychosocial factors such as stress, anger, anxiety, and depression promote heart disease. Alternately, the use of mood-enhancing or stress-reducing techniques--such as optimism, meditation, counseling, exercise, and imagery--...

Mind your heart.

Clinicians as far back as the father of internal medicine, Sir William Osler, have noted characteristic behavioral patterns in patients with heart disease. In 1897, Osler observed that “the typical heart disease patient is a keen and ambitious man . . . whose engine is always at full speed ahead” (1). Almost a century later, cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman picked up on this theme by linking...

Broken heart: Broken mind.

The increased frequency of sudden cardiac death after earthquakes and bombings has long proposed that emotional distress plays a role in acute coronary syndromes and arrhythmias. Since the 1960s, several controlled, prospective, epidemiological studies have reported emotional distress as a major risk factor for the onset and worsening of coronary heart disease (CHD) [1]. The Interheart study, a...

Oasis.