Heart Disease Is Linked to Depression

Men who have suffered bouts of clinical depression are more than twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who have not, a long-term study says. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, who followed their subjects for up to four decades, discovered that 132, or about 12%, of the 1,190 male medical students enrolled in the study had suffered clinically diagnosed depression and that they were 2.12 times as likely to develop heart disease as those who were free of depression. A total of 153 of the subjects died during the study, 34 of them from cardiovascular disease. Several hundred others suffered from some type of heart disease. Researchers also said depression was linked to a greater overall risk of death, although it was not found to be associated with a higher risk of stroke. The study appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a journal published by the American Medical Assn.