Depression and your heart:
Link between depression, coronary heart disease
Newswise — According to a
large-scale study in Sweden, people who have been diagnosed
with depression, especially younger patients between 25 and
50 years of age, are at increased risk of developing
Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) later in life. Even after
accounting for socioeconomic status and gender, the risk was
greatest for those diagnosed before 40.
In an article published in
the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, researchers from the Karolinska Institute, Center
for Family and Community Medicine, Huddinge, Sweden,
examined the complete hospital discharge records for all
patients in Sweden from 1987 to 2001. After identifying a
total of 44,826 cases of first hospital admissions for
depression (19,620 men and 25,206 women) in the Swedish
family coronary heart disease database, they found that
1,916 developed CHD. By combining these records with an
extensive registry of Swedish residents, risk estimates by
age, gender, geographic region and socioeconomic status
could be calculated.
Across all age and gender
groups, patients diagnosed with depression were about 1.5
times more likely to develop CHD than patients with no
diagnosis of depression. In the youngest age group, 25 to
39, the risk ratio was about 3.
Kristina Sundquist, MD, PhD, writes “The present study
showed that young to middle aged people hospitalized for
depression had a high risk of developing CHD. Primary
healthcare teams meet patients with depression, and it is
important that they treat depression as an additional
individual and independent CHD risk factor.” She continues,
“Patients with clinical depression should be given not only
short-term treatment, but also maintenance therapy to
prevent relapses and recurrences of depression.”