Type D Personality and Coronary Plaque Vulnerability in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease: An Optical Coherence...

To investigate the association between Type D personality and higher incidence of major adverse cardiac events, we used in vivo optical coherence tomography (OCT) to evaluate the association between Type D with coronary plaque characteristics.

A total of 109 patients who had culprit coronary plaque (s) were included in the study. The Type D construct was analyzed using both the categorized and the continuous approaches. Plaque vulnerability of culprit lesions was measured by OCT.

After adjusting for demographic and clinical factors, multivariate analysis demonstrated that Type D was associated with lipid plaque (odds ratio [OR] = 4.87, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.41-11.14, p = .025), thin cap fibroatheroma (OR = 3.84, 95% CI = 1.36-10.85, p = .011), and fibrous cap thickness (β = -1.43, standard error = 0.04, p = .001) analyzed by categorical approach. When analyzing Type D as continuous variable, the negative affectivity component was significantly related to plaque vulnerability, including lipid plaque (OR = 3.43, 95% CI = 1.23-9.52, p = .018), thin cap fibroatheroma (OR = 2.20, 95% CI = 1.10-4.40, p = .026), and fibrous cap thickness (β = -0.05, standard error = 0.02, p = .030), whereas no associations between the negative affectivity by social inhibition interaction term with OCT indices were found.

The results suggest that plaque characteristics in Type D have more features of plaque vulnerability. The negative affectivity component seems to drive the associations between Type D and vulnerable plaques. These findings provide new insights into the mechanism involved in the association between Type D and major adverse cardiac event.