Patients are living longer with heart disease – but are they happy?

Better medical treatments for heart disease are helping patients live longer, and research shows that the older the patient, the more they are enjoying that extra time.
 
The American Heart Association (AHA), in a new study published online in the medical journal Circulation, found that adults with coronary heart disease (CHD), were generally less happy than people without coronary heart disease, scoring up to 9% lower on four scales measuring quality of life in a comparative evaluation.

However, the older the patient, the happier they seemed to be.
 
The Heart Association defined quality of life as measured by physical functioning, social functioning, overall life satisfaction, and an individual’s perceptions of their own health status.

AHA said the medical barometer can be used to measure how effective a treatment is, and predict how long a patient will live after a cardiac event.