Introduction & Objective: Depression and anxiety are common after acute myocardial infarction and are associated with an increased risk of mortality and morbidity. Also acute coronary syndrome is the most frequent cause of hospitalization in everyday cardio logical practice. Because the frequency of depression and anxiety in patients with acute coronary syndrome has not been examined well in our institute, we conducted a study to make it clear.

Materials & Methods: In a descriptive cross-sectional study, interviews were carried out in the hospital with 360 patients with acute coronary syndrome. Depression and anxiety were assessed using the 13 and 10 item symptom checklist-90 (SCL-90) and was defined as a score of 10.4 or higher for depression and a score of 8 or higher for anxiety. All the data were extracted by questionnaire and compared with c2, one way ANOVA test and Pearson coefficient by using SPSS 13 Software.

Results: The SCL-90 identified depression and anxiety in 66.6% and 47.5% of patients ,respectively. There is no difference between the age of the patients with various degrees of depression and anxiety. For those subjects who were depressed, distinctly higher scores on anxiety variables were established. Also, depression and anxiety were significantly higher in females than males (P<0.001).

Conclusion: Depression and anxiety were common following an acute coronary syndrome in our institute, with a strong correlation between anxiety and depression in this sample of patients.