Bridging Cardiac and Mental Health: Screening for Depression in Cardiology Settings.

Depression is a highly prevalent comorbidity in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), affecting approximately one in five cardiac patients and contributing to adverse cardiovascular outcomes, increased mortality, and reduced quality of life. Despite clinical guidelines from the American Heart Association recommending routine depression screening, implementation remains inconsistent across cardiology settings. This narrative review synthesizes current evidence on depression screening practices in cardiology clinics, examining prevalence, screening tools, and implementation barriers. The prevalence of depression in cardiovascular patients ranges from 15% to 30%, with higher rates observed in post-myocardial infarction and heart failure populations globally. The two-step screening approach using Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) followed by Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) demonstrates optimal sensitivity (83-87%) and specificity (78-92%) while minimizing patient burden. Major implementation barriers include time constraints, inadequate workflow integration, insufficient mental health resources, provider knowledge gaps, and patient-level factors, including stigma and poor treatment acceptance. Successful implementation of depression screening in cardiology clinics requires multilevel strategies addressing system, provider, and patient factors through electronic health record integration, standardized protocols, collaborative care models, and stakeholder engagement.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Cureus

• Publication date

  2026-01-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7759/cureus.102107PMID 41732610PMCID PMC12924758
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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