Like Pearson, Inger Burnett-Zeigler believes that a lot of younger women’s depressive symptoms are driven by anxiety. “They’re anxious about expectations around motherhood and balancing that with their other obligations,” said Burnett-Zeigler, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “A lot of them are feeling overwhelmed and are worried about who is going to help them. They are worried about whether the baby will be OK and whether they will be OK as moms.”

“Things have changed a lot from the Eisenhower era of bed rest,” said Dr. R. Kannan Mutharasan, a cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Back then, patients were told to lie in bed and were even given “stool softeners so people didn’t have to strain,” he said. Instead, his long-term recovery involved a fitness routine that includes weight lifting, yoga, Pilates, walking and, yes, running. Today, many doctors prescribe exercise for their patients who have had heart attacks. Any exercise regimen requires careful monitoring and medical supervision. But for many, exercise post-heart attack has been shown to improve quality of life and decrease the risk for another cardiac event.

No one knows exactly how PTSD might work to increase the risk of heart disease, but Morabia suspects the psychological condition “may stimulate the production of inflammatory cells that then go into the blood vessels and create atherosclerosis.” One big advantage this study has over previous ones linking PTSD to heart disease is that it followed people over time to see who experienced heart attacks and strokes, said Dr. Mark Huffman of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Huffman, who wasn’t involved in the study, said future research should look into whether treatment of PTSD would lead to a reduction of cardiovascular events.

IntelliCare, developed at Northwestern University’s Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, is based on a similar methodology aimed at depression and anxiety and includes a suite of programs. Some of these mini-apps give advice, others offer a checklist. “When you start, the app gives you a brief screening to find out the severity” of the user’s problems, said psychologist Stephen Schueller, one of IntelliCare’s developers and an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern. Individuals who are depressed and likely to stay in bed all day might be prompted with “goals” to get out of bed, brush their teeth and eat something. “So you check them off as you do them,” Schueller said, “and as you check them off, you’re given harder things to accomplish. People really like being challenged.”