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| EDITORIAL |
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| Year : 2017 | Volume
: 1
| Issue : 1 | Page : 3 |
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My hopes for heart and mind
Mark Heitner
Director, Psychiatry-Pulmonary Internet Research Lab, Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute and Visiting Scholar, Fudan University, China
| Date of Web Publication | 24-May-2017 |
Correspondence Address:
Mark Heitner
Wise Health Technology (Shanghai)
China
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/hm.hm_8_17
How to cite this article:
Heitner M. My hopes for heart and mind. Heart Mind 2017;1:3 |
I hope Heart and Mind has great impact.
My experience as a practicing psychiatrist in San Francisco is that psychiatrists rarely talk with cardiologists about shared patients. This is a lost opportunity to help patients with multiple illnesses. Unfortunately, US journals rarely do not help to improve communication between these specialists.
US medical journals publish many articles about the impact of mental illness on heart patients and the special psychiatric issues caused by heart disease. The articles address important questions. The problem is that these articles are published in mental health journals and therefore are rarely read by internists. The impact on internists and on their patients is quite limited.
The leaders of Heart and Mind are some of the most well-known cardiologists in China. It is to their great credit that they have had insight into the importance of creating a journal about these topics that will be read by cardiologists.
Just as important, they have created the foundation for heart and mind research in China. “The value of Chinese version of GAD-7 and PHQ-9 to screen anxiety and depression in cardiovascular outpatients” (J Am Coll Cardiol 2014;64 Supl: C222-DOI: DOI 10.1016/j.jacc.2014.06.1038). This paper demonstrated that there are simple tools we can use for research purposes in heart patients in China. Patients in the US usually take these brief psychological tests without assistance from clinicians. Now, we know they can be used in China. The ease of administering these tests hopefully makes routine mental health data collection part of clinical research of the future, potentially for publication in Heart and Mind.
The timing of this could not be better. Professor Yifeng Xu, Professor of Psychiatry and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, hopes to see multidisciplinary research become common in China. His encouragement had an immediate impact in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) research.
Professor Chunxue Bai, Chief of Pulmonary Medicine, Zhongshan Hospital and Director of the Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute, approved a pilot of screening COPD patients for anxiety and depression. That project will use online PHQ-9 and GAD-7 along with online COPD symptom measurements. This project will use my mental health WeChat for heart and lung patients, Spirit of the Season. This same method can be applied to heart research.
Internet+ will change research methodologies as clinics and patients embrace online treatment and online research. Let's hope that internet-based psychological screening will flourish in the future of cardiology research and that many of the articles that come from this research will get published by Heart and Mind.
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