Depressed? It May Boost Your Diabetes Risk

Diabetes and depression often occur together, but it’s always been a chicken-or-egg scenario. Does diabetes make people depressed or are depressed people more likely to develop diabetes? Now a large new study suggests it’s both.

People with diabetes have a higher risk for developing depression than those without the chronic condition and those who are depressed are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, according to a report in the November 22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

What’s more, the study found that the more severe the depression or diabetes, the higher the risk for the other condition.

For example, women who took antidepressants—often a sign of more serious and longer-lasting depression—had a higher risk of developing diabetes than women who weren’t taking mood-elevating drugs.

Similarly, diabetics in the study who were already taking insulin to control their condition—a signal that the disease is progressing—were much more likely to suffer from depression than people not taking insulin.

“We can say that the two conditions are linked to each other and are both the causes and the consequences of each other,” says the study’s senior author, Frank Hu, M.D., Ph.D., professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. The authors followed 65,381 women aged 50 to 75 who were participating in the landmark Nurses’ Health Study, and recorded depression and new cases of type 2 diabetes over a 10-year period.

One in every 10 adults in the U.S. has diabetes, including nearly 1 in 4 people 60 or older. About 90% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, which is more likely to occur with aging, excess weight, and a sedentary lifestyle. (People with type 1, an autoimmune disease unrelated to aging or lifestyle, were not included in the study.)