Effectively treating depression in patients who have just experienced a heart attack will not only improve their quality of life, it could well improve their mortality, new research from Korea suggests.

Among 300 patients who had recently experienced acute coronary syndrome and had depression as a comorbidity, those randomised to a 24-week course of escitalopram were 30% less likely to have a major adverse cardiac event over a median of eight years compared with those given placebo.

In actual numbers, 40.9% (61) of the 149 patients given escitalopram had a major adverse event (including cardiac death, MI or PCI) over the period of follow-up compared with 53.6% (81) of the placebo group (151 patients), according to the study findings published in JAMA.