Association of preoperative anxiety and depression symptoms with postoperative complications of cardiac surgeries.

OBJECTIVE: to investigate the associations of preoperative anxiety and depression symptoms with postoperative complications and with sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of patients submitted to the first coronary artery bypass graft.

METHOD: observational, analytical and longitudinal study. A consecutive non-probabilistic sample consisted of patients submitted to coronary artery bypass graft. To evaluate the symptoms, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale was used. tracheal intubation for more than 48 hours, hemodynamic instability, sensorineural deficit, agitation, hyperglycemia, infection, nausea, vomiting, pain and death were classified as complications. The Mann-Whitney and Spearman Correlation tests were used, with a significance level of 0.05.

RESULTS: a total of 75 patients participated. The group that presented hemodynamic instability in the postoperative period had a greater median for the anxiety symptoms (p = 0.012), as well as the women (p = 0.028). The median of the depression symptoms was higher in the group presenting nausea (p = 0.002), agitation (p <0.001), tracheal intubation for more than 48 hours (p = 0.018) and sensorineural deficit (p = 0.016).

CONCLUSION: there was association of the symptoms of preoperative anxiety with hemodynamic instability in the postoperative period and with the female gender, as well as association of depression symptoms with the following complications: nausea, agitation, time of intubation in the postoperative period and sensorineural deficit.