14 DAY TRIAL // During a presentation held at the EuroHeartCare 2014 conference recently, researchers from the Levanger Hospital in Norway presented the results of a new scientific study that revealed a 40 percent increase in heart failure risks for patients suffering from mild to severe depression, as opposed to their peers who were not depressed.
LH intensive care nurse Lise Tuset Gustad, the first author of the new study, argued that a direct, dose-response relationship exists between symptoms related to depression and people's risks of suffering from heart failure. The more depressed a patient feels, the more likely they are to develop such a condition, PsychCentral reports. The new study followed a total of 63,000 test subjects.
“Depressive symptoms increase the chance of developing heart failure and the more severe the symptoms are, the greater the risk. Depressed people have less healthy lifestyles, so our analysis adjusted for factors such as obesity and smoking that could cause both depression and heart failure. This means we can be confident that these factors did not cause the association,” Gustad explains.
The research group used the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale to measure depression in all test participants. Other information that was collected includes blood pressure levels, smoking and alcohol habits, body-mass index, and data related to physical activity levels. The team found that the connection between depression and heart failure held even after accounting for all of these influences.