Treat Depression & Reduce Risk of Heart Attack!

Both diseases are extremely common. Now some scientists believe they may be linked. But if a doctor treats your depression, is she also reducing your risk of getting a heart attack?

A new study, carried out at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, UT, investigated the heretofore invisible links between heart disease and depression and emerged with some very positive news.

“Our study shows that prompt, effective treatment of depression appears to improve the risk of poor heart health,” said Heidi May, PhD, a cardiovascular epidemiologist with the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute.

Dr. May and her team found that there is very little data that is publicly available about the intersection of these ailments, so they turned to Intermountain Healthcare's depression registry, which contains information from more than 100,000 patients. They compiled information from 7,550 patients who completed at least two depression questionnaires over the course of one to two years.

Patients were categorized based on the results of their survey as never depressed, no longer depressed, remained depressed, or became depressed. Following each patient’s completion of the last questionnaire, patients were followed to see if they had any major cardiovascular problems such as a stroke, heart failure, heart attack or death.

At the conclusion of the study, 4.6 percent of patients who were no longer depressed had a similar occurrence of major cardiovascular complications as those who had no depression at all (4.8 percent).

Those who remained depressed, however, and those who became depressed throughout the study, had increased occurrences of major cardiovascular problems — their rates were 6 and 6.4 percent, respectively. Treatment for depression resulted in a decreased risk of cardiovascular risk that was similar to someone who didn’t have depression.

Is there a practical application to all this? Dr. May said the research indicates that effective treatment for depression decreases the risk of having cardiovascular problems in the short term, but further study is needed to identify exactly what that treatment should include.

But which comes first? Does depression create the well-known cardiac disease harbingers of high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, diabetes, or lack of exercise – or do these triggers also serve as indicators for depression?

Results from the study indicate that changes in depression symptoms may also cause immediate physiological changes in the body, which in turn cause major cardiovascular problems to occur in the short term, but future studies are needed to further answer these questions.

“What we’ve done thus far is simply observe data that has previously been collected,” Dr. May said. “In order to dig deeper, we need do a full clinical trial to fully evaluate what we’ve observed.”