United States: The latest report finds that depression affects every part of the body since it speeds up how quickly older people develop long-term physical illnesses.
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As per Kelly Fleetwood, a team lead and a statistician at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, “People who’ve experienced depression are more likely to develop long-term physical health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes,” US News reported.
According to their research on 172,500 Britons above age 39, depression-prone participants started developing chronic illnesses ahead of non-depression-prone individuals by about 30 percent.
The research analyzed data that continues to accumulate in the UK Biobank database. The study examined individuals from age 40 to 71 who conducted initial assessments during the time period from 2006 to 2010.
The authors followed participants’ health status during a period averaging almost 7 years to monitor the development of 69 designated physical health conditions, US News reported.
What are the more findings?
According to research findings, subjects who did not suffer from depression during the study acquired approximately 0.16 physical health conditions yearly.
The study revealed annual physical condition developments reached 2.0 per year among people diagnosed with depression in the past.
About the most common illnesses, there was osteoarthritis (15.7 percent of those with depression versus 12.5 percent without), high blood pressure (12.9 percent versus 12.0 percent), and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) (13.8 percent versus 9.6 percent).
The medical community should view depression as a holistic condition requiring comprehensive therapies and treatments according to presented research findings.
Moreover, they added, “However, existing healthcare systems are designed to treat individual conditions, instead of individual people with multiple conditions,” US News reported.
“We need healthcare services to take an integrated approach to caring for people who have both depression and long-term physical health conditions,” they continued.