Psychological aspects in patients undergoing cardiac surgery

This thesis researches psychological aspects in adult patients undergoing heart surgery. The thesis is divided into theoretical and empirical part. The theoretical part discusses depressive and anxiety symptomatology, quality of life and type D personality, in the context of cardiac surgery. Basic characteristics, possible relations, impacts of occurrence of these aspects and possible related interventions, which seem to be beneficial for cardiac surgery, are presented for each topic. In the empirical part, the symptoms of depression, anxiety and health-related quality of life were examined using a sample of (N = 47) patients undergoing valve surgery. BDI-II, BAI and SF-36 methods were used. The research was conducted in three measurements. The first measurement took place before the surgery, the second before the end of hospitalization and the third took place 30 days after being discharged from the hospital. It was discovered that the depressive symptomatology of our sample differed significantly from the normative sample in the first and second measurements. In the first measurement, the respondents of our sample differed significantly from the norm in the symptomatology of anxiety. In both cases it was an increased symptomatology of depression or anxiety over the norm. In the dimensions of..