Role of patients' view of their illness in predicting return to work and functioning after myocardial infarction: longitudinal study

Causal attributions, lifestyle change, and coronary heart disease: Illness beliefs of patients of South Asian and European origin living in the United Kingdom

“…Illness representations have been shown to influence a range of outcomes such as dietary change 6 , help seeking behaviour 7 , in-hospital recovery 8 functional status and return to work 9 in patients diagnosed with CHD. In light of this, effective education and counselling of patients recovering from a cardiac event should include the exploration and understanding of patients' illness representations and how these may influence lifestyle modification choices.…”

Illness perceptions among cardiac patients: Relation to depressive symptomatology and sex

“…The common illness perception related to depressive symptomatology among both women and men with ACS was time course. Unfortunately, ACS is a chronic condition, and perceiving it as such is instrumental to engaging in recuperative health behaviors such as medication adherence, fruit and vegetable consumption, and engaging in regular physical activity [19,23]. However, these results suggest that efforts to minimize the perceived course of the condition may be warranted where patients are experiencing elevated depression.…”

“…Previous research has highlighted the importance of personal models of illness to ACS recovery [19][20][21]. Patients' illness perceptions have been shown to relate not only to adherence behaviors and functional status [19,20,[22][23][24][25], but also to emotional distress [26][27][28], including depressive symptomatology [26,29] across numerous health conditions.…”

“…Patients' illness perceptions have been shown to relate not only to adherence behaviors and functional status [19,20,[22][23][24][25], but also to emotional distress [26][27][28], including depressive symptomatology [26,29] across numerous health conditions. The construct of illness perceptions stems from Leventhal's Self-Regulation Model [30,31].…”

“…While previous work has explored the effect of these illness perceptions on health behaviors in cardiac populations [19,20,23,25,27,32,33], the relationship between illness perceptions and depressive symptomatology has yet to be explored [25]. Such an examination may shed light on possible gender differences in depression and the gender differential in psychosocial treatment outcomes as outlined above.…”