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Depression Associated With a 51% Higher Risk of Dementia
Proactive, timely treatment of late-in-life depression could help to lower risk of dementia in certain patients, according to study findings published in Biological Psychiatry.
"The negative association between depression treatment and incident dementia was significant in the increasing and chronically low course,” researchers noted, “highlighting the necessity of timely interventional strategies before depression progress to a chronically severe state.”
Researchers analyzed data from 354,313 participants aged 50 to 70 years from 2006 to 2020. First, researchers focused on the effect of depression on dementia incidence across 4 subgroups: increasing course, decreasing course, chronically high course, and chronically low course. From there, 46,820 participants with depression diagnoses were further put into treated or untreated groups. Researchers compared dementia risk across all groups by performing survival analyses.
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Researchers found a 51% increase in dementia risk in patients with increasing, chronically high, and chronically low courses of depression, while no association was found in patients in the decreasing course. Receiving depression treatment led to a hazard ratio of 0.7. Treating increasing and chronically low courses of depression reduced risk of dementia by 42% and 29%, respectively.
“Providing depression treatment for those with late-life depression might not only remit affective symptoms but also postpone the onset of dementia,” said author Wei Cheng, PhD, Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. “The new findings shed some light on previous work as well. The differences of effectiveness across depression courses might explain the discrepancy between previous studies.”
