Associations Between Mental Health Disorder Symptoms and Cardiac Function Among Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cadets during the Cadet Training Program

Why was the study done?

Effectively regulating cardiac function is a complex process involving interplay between neuroautonomic and neuroendocrine systems as part of efforts to appropriately respond to ongoing environmental demands or stressors. Professions who experience frequent exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs; e.g., fire or explosion, natural disaster, sexual assault), such as RCMP, report more symptoms of various posttraumatic stress injuries (PTSIs), including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), major depressive disorder (MDD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), and correlates like alcohol use disorder (AUD). Chronic exposures to stressors, such as PPTEs, have been associated with an increased risk of experiencing a major adverse cardiac event (MACE). To date, few studies have demonstrably evidenced affiliations among mental health disorder symptoms and functional changes in cardiac contractility, let alone longitudinal associations among high-stress and at-risk occupational samples. The current study is the first effort with RCMP cadets to investigates both cross-sectional and longitudinal directional relationships among mental health disorder symptoms and cardiac functions. 

What was done in the study?

The current research draws on data from the larger, 10-year RCMP Study, a part of a Federal Framework on PTSD. Participants were RCMP members (n=81; 71.6% male) finishing the Cadet Training Program and completing assessments including: web-delivered surveys assessing current and mental health disorder symptoms, and ambulatory monitoring of cardiac function via seismocardiography (SCG). 

What did we find out?

The current study evidenced directionally and theoretically consistent relationships among changes in mental health disorder symptoms and measures of cardiac function; specifically, increases in mental health disorder symptoms were associated with problematic changes in cardiac functions. The relative magnitude of change in cardiac function from pre-training to pre-deployment was not clinically or statistically significant for many of the measures; nevertheless, the directional associations remain clinically important because diastolic cardiac dysfunction is robustly associated with an increased risk of a MACE. The associations also provide a strong rationale for integrating cardiac rehabilitation exercise guidelines into occupational fitness and wellness programs to potentially mitigate the impact of occupational stressors including repeated PPTE exposures on cardiac function.