American Heart Association volunteer expert, Roxana Mehran, M.D., FACC, FAHA, MSCAI, FESC, is Mount Sinai professor in Cardiovascular Clinical Research and Outcomes, Director of Interventional Cardiovascular Research and Clinical Trials, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York.

Offering perspective on AHA Scientific Sessions 2020 Presentation 314 
copyright American Heart Association 2020

"The shocking and most important part of this study was that we had the very large number of female veterans from the Veteran Association, from the VA hospitals. In the 390,000 women in that database from 2000 to 2017 , there was 130,000 women who experienced PTSD. And what is that? First of all, it's a health condition when the women or whoever it is who's exposed to it actually witnesses a shocking dangerous scary event that has an impact on them. And that the linkage of PTSD to heart disease has been previously known. We all know that stress stressors and stress in and of itself can provoke even heart attacks. We know about Takotsubo, we know so many of the acute events being triggered by a stress. But post-traumatic stress disorder is not a one-time stress but rather a syndrome of chronic stress that these men and women are facing. So it could be sleeplessness, anxiety, not feeling well, not understanding why they don't feel well. And unfortunately it's not something that just goes away. It's something that is there."