Depression And Diabetes: Fellow Travelers, Researchers Say

Researchers have long known that type-2 diabetes and depression often go hand in hand. However, it's been unclear which condition develops first in patients who end up with both. Now, a new study led by Johns Hopkins doctors suggests that this chicken-and-egg problem has a dual answer: Patients with depression have an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes, and patients with type-2 diabetes have an increased risk of developing depression.Results showed that those with elevated depressive symptoms were 42 percent more likely overall to develop diabetes by the end of the study than those without these symptoms. Moreover, the stronger the symptoms, the higher the risk of diabetes, a "dose response" that lends strength to the findings.Even when the researchers accounted for such factors as overweight, lack of exercise, and smoking, the risk of developing diabetes was still 34 percent higher for patients with depressive symptoms. To investigate whether diabetes could lead to depression, Golden and her colleagues used the same pool of MESA information and excluded those who had elevated depressive symptoms at the initial clinic visit. Then, they looked to see whether those who had high fasting glucose--with or without a formal diagnosis of diabetes--were more likely to develop depressive symptoms by the end of the study.The researchers found that patients treated for diabetes, about 9 percent of the group, were about 54 percent more likely to develop elevated depressive symptoms than those without diabetes.Surprisingly, those with prediabetes or untreated diabetes were about 25 percent less likely to develop elevated depressive symptoms than people with normal fasting glucose, a finding Golden's team cannot explain at this time."It's important that doctors be attuned to look for both conditions in patients at risk for either diabetes or depression," Golden adds. "We may want to develop interventions for both treatments, instead of just one or the other." -sciencedaily