Expressive Writing for Heart Healing (WrittenHeart)

Istituto Auxologico Italiano

Status: Completed

Conditions: Ischemic Heart Disease; Obesity

Treatments: Behavioral: Disease-related Expressive writing; Behavioral: Active Comparator: Traditional expressive writing; Behavioral: Sham Comparator: Neutral writing

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01253486

GMM 2010

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study will determine whether the psychological and physical benefits of expressive writing extend to obese in-patients with Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD)referred to cardiac rehabilitation

Full description

Expressive writing, for as little as 3-5 sessions of 20 minutes, has been found to improve both physical and psychological health based on health outcome measures such as number of doctor's visits and hospital days, blood pressure control, lung and immune function, pain, anxiety and depression. Given its simplicity and obvious advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness, expressive writing has great potential as a therapeutic tool or as a means of self-help, either alone or as an adjunct to traditional therapies. This modality has not been studied in obese patients with Ischemic Heart Disease.

Enrollment: 100 patients

Sex: All

Ages: Under 70 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• obesity
• Ischemic Heart disease
• Signed informed consent

Exclusion criteria

• Visual or manual limitations that preclude reading and writing
• Unwilling to participate

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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100 participants in 4 patient groups

Disease-related expressive writing

Experimental group

Description:

Participants in the disease-related expressive writing condition write about their feelings about cardiac disease four times, for at least 20 minutes each time, during a two week period

Treatment:

Behavioral: Disease-related Expressive writing

Traditional expressive writing

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants in the traditional expressive writing condition write about their feelings about one or more stressful experiences they lived in the past, for at least 20 minutes each time, during a two week period

Treatment:

Behavioral: Active Comparator: Traditional expressive writing

Neutral writing

Sham Comparator group

Description:

Participants in the neutral writing condition write about the facts about cardiac disease, for at least 20 minutes each time, during a two week period

Treatment:

Behavioral: Sham Comparator: Neutral writing

Control condition

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants in the control condition do not receive any intervention and complete only the assessments