Depression is more common in women than in men, mainly because figures that quote rates of depression include post-natal depression, which affects roughly one in ten women.
New research has found that as well as having suffered depression, which in itself is debilitating and traumatic, women who have had depression are at greater risk of suffering from strokes.
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston studied approximately 80,000 women over the period 2000 to 2006. The women were aged between 54 and 79, the optimal age for women to be at risk of stroke.
Twenty-two percent of the women had suffered depression in 2000. In total, out of the 80,000 women studied, roughly 1,000 suffered strokes during the six-year period.
Having a history of depression was associated with a twenty-nine percent rise in the risk of stroke. Those women who had used antidepressants increased their risk of stroke by thirty-nine percent.
Lead researcher Dr Kathryn Rexrode said, ‘I don’t think the medications themselves are the primary cause of the risk. This study does not suggest that people should stop their medications to reduce the risk of stroke.’ Good advice, considering that depression can be a fatal illness if not treated, if the sufferer becomes suicidal.
The researchers said that perhaps depression may make sufferers less able to manage other medical problems like high blood pressure, and make them less willing to look after themselves in terms of their diet and exercise, perhaps explaining the resultant increased risk in stroke. The research merely finds a correlation between depression and stroke (i.e. people with depression are more likely to have strokes) and not a causal one (i.e. they are not saying that people have strokes because they have had depression).
The researchers said, ’It is very hard to determine whether there is a direct link between depression and stroke risk and a lot more research is needed in this area before depression alone can be viewed as a stroke risk factor.’
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