After someone has been diagnosed with depression, they are more likely than non-depressed people to develop additional health conditions. These include a wide range of physical health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, asthma, and diabetes. However, we do not know enough about why this increased risk occurs, or what pathways connect depression to the development of other health conditions. CoMorMent researchers and their colleagues sought to investigate this important topic by using data held in UK Biobank.
UK Biobank is a dataset containing health information, including hospital records, from about 500,000 people in the UK. The CoMorMent researchers used UK Biobank to find people who had been admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of depression. Some of these people had depression as their primary diagnosis, though in 65% of cases the primary reason for hospital admission was a physical health condition, with depression as a secondary diagnosis. For each person with depression, the researchers selected five people without an inpatient depression diagnosis as comparison individuals.
Researchers then used this information to look at the participants’ health after their diagnosis of depression. They found that 129 medical conditions were more likely in the group of people with a prior diagnosis of depression than in the comparison group. These conditions fit into three broad categories: cardiometabolic conditions, chronic inflammation, and tobacco-related disease. People who received an inpatient diagnosis of depression were also more likely to die during the study period, from causes which included cardiovascular disease, respiratory system disease, and cancerous tumours.
These findings suggest that the cardiometabolic system may be negatively impacted by depression, highlighting the need for clinicians to focus on the cardiovascular health of patients with depression. In addition, providing anti-inflammatory treatments and stop-smoking interventions could also help reduce the burden of ill health in people with depression. Above all, clinicians should be mindful that people who are diagnosed with depression are more likely to experience poor physical health after their depression diagnosis, and it is important that steps are taken to reduce this risk wherever possible.
