Children who get diagnosed with depression between the ages of five and 19 are six times more likely to die by the time they’re 31, according to a study.
Researchers in Sweden followed 1.4million people to test whether there was a link between childhood or teenage depression and worse health in adulthood.
While they found a 14-fold increase in the risk of death by self-harm, which may be expected to link with depression, they also saw that people who suffered with mental health disorder in their youth were more likely to be diagnosed with dozens of serious illnessses.
These included type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart diseases, epilepsy, sleep disorders, liver disease and kidney disease.
Depression is one of the most common mental health problems and is found increasingly often among children and teenagers, studies have found.
The study, led by Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet, said that around 2.8 per cent of eight to 13-year-olds get the condition, along with 5.6 per cent of 14 to 18-year-olds.
The researchers behind it said it was the largest study to date to look at links between childhood mental health and physical health in adulthood.
But they admitted it did not prove that childhood depression directly led to people developing the illnesses as they grew older, and that it may be that both had the same root causes or the link worked the other way, for example.
Children and teenagers who get depression face living with worse health in adulthood, a Swedish study found (stock image)
The researchers found that people diagnosed with depression in childhood or their teenage years were ‘significantly’ more likely to develop dozens of health problems
Led by Dr Sarah Bergen at the Karolinska, the experts wrote: ‘These findings highlight the hypothesis that the morbidity of youth depression extends beyond psychiatric and neurologic disorders, increasing the burden of disease and posing quality-of-life and public health challenges.’
They said that although they couldn’t prove depression caused the worse health in adulthood, knowing about the link would help doctors to monitor patients.
In the study, which lasted for 31 years from 1982 to 2013, a total of 37,185 of the people were diagnosed with depression during their childhood or teenage years. They were all aged between 17 and 31 by the time the study ended.
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One per cent of the people with depression died before the end of the study compared to 0.4 per cent of people in the non-depression group.
Some of the people died by self-harm – this was 14.6 times more likely in the depression group – but people developed other fatal diseases as well. The causes of death were not all outlined.
The researchers looked at 69 different conditions and considered how much more common they were in the depression group than the healthy group.
They found differences between men and women.
In the paper Dr Bergen and her colleagues explained: ‘Sex differences were observed for many of the examined medical outcomes.
‘In particular, compared with males, females had substantially higher relative and absolute risks for injuries, an increased risk difference for genitourinary infections, and moderately higher relative risks of gastrointestinal, genitourinary, and respiratory infections; cough; and some skin disorders.
‘Conversely, males had comparatively elevated relative risks for obesity, thyroid gland and other endocrine gland disorders, celiac disease, connective tissue disorders, and dermatitis and eczema.
‘Both sexes with youth depression presented increased relative risks for nervous system disorders, type 2 diabetes, viral hepatitis, kidney disease, and liver disease, among others.’
The researchers made clear that their paper could not prove that depression was causing the other illnesses.
It showed only that both were more likely in the same groups of people – it may be that one increased the risk of the other, which is possible in either direction, or other genetic or lifestyle factors that made both more likely.
They added: ‘It is important for future studies to establish whether the observed increased health problems follow causally from depression, stem from shared genetic or environmental risk factors, or whether the associations are due to reverse causality.’
The study was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, by the American Medical Association.
Source: Daily Mail
