Heart Health News: Depression as Bad as Cholesterol and Obesity for the Heart
Depression, a common psychiatric disorder around the world, can have severe repercussions on a person's cardiovascular health.
A recent study has found that men with depression have the same risk for developing heart diseases as those with high cholesterol levels and obesity.
Depression is one of the most common mental ailments today and the World Health Organization says that an estimated 350 million people of all ages suffer from it. While it has been known to cause physiological ailments, the effect it has on the human heart has never been thoroughly understood until now.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
A team of researchers, from the Helmholtz Zentrum München along with colleagues from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the German Center for Cardiovascular Disease (DZHK), sought to find the correlation between depressed mood and exhaustion and the onset of cardiovascular diseases in men. They published their findings in the journal 'Atherosclerosis'.
"There is little doubt that depression is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases," explains lead study author Karl-Heinz Ladwig, Professor of psychosomatic medicine at TUM's Klinikum rechts der Isar. "The question now is: What is the relationship between depression and other risk factors like tobacco smoke, high cholesterol levels, obesity or hypertension – how big a role does each factor play?"
The researchers began their study in a bid to understand the effects of depression on the risk of cardiovascular diseases and to compare it with the four major causes of heart problems -- smoking, obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
In order to accomplish this, Ladwig and his team analysed and observed 3,428 male patients between the ages of 45 and 74 over a period of 10 years.
The study found the impact of depression on cardiovascular health to be the same as that of obesity and high cholesterol levels. Across the population, depression accounts for roughly 15 percent of heart ailment-related deaths. "That is comparable to the other risk factors, such as hypercholesterolemia, obesity and smoking," Ladwig said.
This discovery has led researchers to classify depression in the medium position amongst classical somatic risk factors for deaths due to cardiovascular ailments -- smoking and high blood pressure are associated with the greatest risk.
Based upon their findings, the researchers recommended standardizing diagnostic tests to check for depression in high-risk heart patients as it plays a vital role in affecting their health.
