Fed: Claim that heart monitor helps beat the blues

AAP General News (Australia)
04-15-1999
Fed: Claim that heart monitor helps beat the blues

By Rada Rouse, National Medical Correspondent

BRISBANE, April 15 AAP - People with anxiety and depression can be diagnosed by measuring
the pattern of their heart beat over 24 hours, according to a controversial new theory.

Perth psychiatrist Dr Hans Stampfer has been trialling the use of a circadian monitor in
two hospitals, showing that heart beat patterns change before and after treatment for
psychiatric disorders.

He has also invented a device, approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and due to
be commercially available this year, which clocks changes in the body's rhythms.

Patients wear the HeartLink (HeartLink) monitor for a day, and the data is then fed into a
computer to produce a graph which Dr Stampfer believes will reduce the rate of misdiagnosis -
and missed diagnosis.

"Psychiatry has always been based on clinical observation," Dr Stampfer said.

"There's never been a laboratory test to assist diagnosis despite many years of researchers
trying to find an objective indicator of anxiety and depression."

Dr Stampfer's belief that the circadian pattern - heart rate changes over 24 hours - is a
biological marker for mental illness has been met with scepticism by many colleagues.

"The reaction ranges from encouraging, to wondering whether my trade has finally got to
me," he told AAP.

However he convinced many, after their patients were assessed with the monitor in trials
at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre (QEII) in Perth.

In a later blind study of 60 patients and 20 "normal" people at QEII, Dr Stampfer pitched
the HeartLink diagnosis against clinical assessment by another psychiatrist and a patient
questionnaire.

There was 75 to 80 per cent agreement on who suffered anxiety, who suffered depression and
who had no symptoms - about the accepted norm for clinical diagnosis.

Heart beat monitor results back clinical observations that a person suffering anxiety may
take a long time to get to sleep but then sleeps well, compared to a depressed person who may
quickly fall asleep but wakes frequently during the night.

Dr Robert Broadbent, executive director of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of
Psychiatrists, said the college had not yet had the opportunity to review Dr Stampfer's work
and was not in a position to comment on it.

AAP rr/sd/kr

KEYWORD: PSYCHIATRY HEART

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