Type D personality and all-cause mortality in cardiac patients--data from a German cohort study

Type D personality has been established as a predictor of adverse clinical events in patients with cardiovascular diseases. To date, all studies except one have been conducted by a single research group. Thus, the aim of our study was to provide an independent replication of the results regarding the prognostic validity of Type D personality in a German sample of cardiac patients.

Cardiac patients (n = 1040) were recruited from cardiac rehabilitation centers (n = 484), an outpatient clinic (n = 249), and a university hospital (n = 307). Main analyses were based on the combined data from these three subsamples. Cardiac health status, medical risk factors, sociodemographic characteristics, psychological symptoms, and Type D personality were assessed at baseline. The primary end point was all-cause mortality. The Cox proportional hazards regression model was used to estimate the relative risk of death.

Vital status was known for 977 patients (22.5% women; mean [standard deviation] = 63.3 [10.7] years). Within the follow-up time (mean [standard deviation] = 71.5 [3.6] months), 172 patients died. Type D personality was found in 25.2% of survivors and in 22.2% of nonsurvivors (χ²= 0.78, p = .38). Depressive symptoms (p = .13) and anxiety (p = .27) were also not predictive of mortality. In the multivariate analyses, neither Type D (p = .95) nor negative affectivity (p = .71) and social inhibition (p = .59), as well as their interaction (p = .88), were associated with all-cause mortality.

In the present study, Type D personality and its constituents are not associated with increased mortality in patients with heart disease. The discrepancies with previous results deserve further investigation.