Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) has become one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide. Self-management and self-efficacy are critical for enhancing healthy lifestyles in patients with postoperative CAD and are strongly associated with health-promoting behaviors. However, the underlying mechanisms of this association remain unclear.
Purpose: To explore the mediating role of self-efficacy between self-management and health-promoting behaviors in patients following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
Methods: From November 2024 to March 2025, 400 post-PCI patients were selected by convenience sampling from a tertiary first-class hospital in Xinjiang. Surveys were administered using a general information questionnaire, a self-management scale, a self-efficacy scale, and a health-promoting lifestyle scale. Structural equation modelling was employed to investigate the pathways of action among the three variables.
Results: The scores for self-management behaviour, self-efficacy, and health-promoting lifestyle were (96.66 ± 10.11) scores, (44.49 ± 6.10) scores, and (162.91 ± 12.24) scores, respectively, with positive correlations between each pair of items. Self-efficacy partially mediated the relationship between self-management and health-promoting behaviors, with a standardized indirect effect of 0.317, accounting for 61.3% of the total effect.
Conclusions: Self-efficacy plays a partial mediating role between self-management and health-promoting behaviors. Healthcare professionals should pay attention to the self-efficacy of patients post-PCI to enhance their awareness of personal health and strengthen self-management, thereby promoting proactive adoption of healthy lifestyles.
Copyright: © 2026 Cao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.