Depression Can Speed Onset of Chronic Illnesses, Study Finds

Depression hits the whole body, speeding the onset of long-term physical ills as people age, new research contends.

“People who’ve experienced depression are more likely to develop long-term physical health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes,” noted a team led by Kelly Fleetwood, a statistician at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Their study of more than 172,500 Britons over the age of 39 found that those with a history of depression began to develop long-term physical conditions about 30% earlier than people without such histories.

The findings were published Feb. 13 in the journal PLOS Medicine.

The new study looked at data from the ongoing UK Biobank. It included adults ages 40 to 71 who completed baseline assessments between 2006 and 2010.

Participants’ health was followed for an average of just under seven years, and Fleetwood’s team tracked the onset of 69 selected physical conditions.

Over the study period, people without any history of depression developed an average of 0.16 of these conditions per year, the study found.

However, that number jumped to 2.0 per year for people who had a history of depression.

Among the most common illnesses: osteoarthritis (15.7% of those with depression versus 12.5% without); high blood pressure (12.9% versus 12.0%); and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) (13.8% versus 9.6%).

All of this means that depression should be looked upon holistically, as a “whole body” disease, and treated accordingly, researchers said.

“However, existing healthcare systems are designed to treat individual conditions, instead of individual people with multiple conditions,” they wrote. “We need healthcare services to take an integrated approach to caring for people who have both depression and long-term physical health conditions.”

More information

Find out more about spotting and treating depression at Harvard Health.

SOURCE: PLOS Medicine, news release, Feb. 13, 2025

Source: HealthDay