The Relationship Between Having a Positive Mindset and Exercise Capacity in Patients With Congenital Heart Disease

Patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) have variable degrees of exercise capacity and levels of physical activity that is not necessarily related to disease severity (1,2) and is not fixed as supervised exercise training can achieve improved fitness across a spectrum of hemodynamic deficits (3-5). Effectiveness of training relates to frequency, intensity, time, and type of exercise as well as motivation to participate. Research in the psychology literature in athletes and in non-athletes alike has demonstrated that optimism and positive mentality result in improved exercise capacity, enhanced training results, and resilience to stress (6-11). Further, the general concept of resilience in children may be the sum result of the balance of positive and negative inputs (12), and these factors are also modifiable. The degree with which having a positive mindset impacts functional capacity irrespective of congenital heart disease severity is not known; if there is a correlation, then the idea that mindset could potentially be a target for an intervention to improve health in children with CHD is intriguing.

This study seeks to assess the correlation of positive thinking to physiological outcomes by comparing the degree of positive mindset of patients with congenital heart disease (as measured by questionnaire data to assess the balance of optimistic thinking to anxiety) with their functional capacity (as measured by peak oxygen consumption (peakVO2) on exercise testing). The ability to measure "mindset" in the clinic setting is now feasible after the recent release of a set of validated questionnaires for children (and parent-proxies) known as PROMIS (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System), developed under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (www.healthmeasures.net/explore-measurement-systems/promis). These questionnaires are short (4-8 questions), free, and integrate into the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) database, making delivery Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant and scoring automatic. In addition, the PROMIS measures contain both retrospective positive quality of life questions (life satisfaction, positive well-being) as well as a future facing tool measuring degree of optimism and purpose, making it ideally suited for the present research proposal. While PROMIS tools have been utilized in childhood chronic illnesses such as arthritis and kidney disease, they have not yet been reported in children with congenital heart disease. Thus, a secondary goal of this proposal is to assess the distribution of meaning and purpose scores and anxiety scores of children with CHD compared to the population norms.