January 27, 2021 Psychological health can affect CVD risk in both negative and positive ways, raising the potential for clinicians to leverage this when caring for patients, asserts a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA). He compiles the evidence “The mind, heart, and body are interconnected, and what affects one affects the other two.” said Glenn N. Levine, MD (Baylor College of Medicine, Dallas, TX). “We need to not only treat a specific disease state but [also] at least try as best we can to consider the patient and the person as a whole.” Levine, who chaired the document’s writing group, said the AHA statement was inspired by his realization about a year and a half ago that there “were more and more high-quality studies that seem to clearly be linking psychological health, both negative and positive, with cardiac risk and cardiac outcomes.”