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March 19, 2019 – 16:39 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – People with cardiac disease are more likely to suffer from depression, and the opposite is also true. Scientists at the University of Cambridge believe that they have identified a link between these two conditions: inflammation-The body's response to negative environmental factors, such as stress, reports Medical Xpress.
Inflammation is a natural reaction necessary to fight against infection, but chronic inflammation – which can result from psychological stress as well as lifestyle-related factors, such as smoking, consumption excessive alcohol, physical inactivity and obesity – is harmful.
The link between heart disease and depression is well documented. People who have a heart attack are at a much higher risk of suffering from depression. However, scientists were unable to determine whether this was due to two conditions sharing common genetic factors or whether shared environmental factors provided the link.
"It is possible that heart disease and depression share common underlying biological mechanisms, which manifest themselves in two different conditions in two different organs: the cardiovascular system and the brain," says Dr. Golam Khandaker, an intermediate clinical researcher. Wellcome Trust at the University of Cambridge. "Our work suggests that inflammation could be a common mechanism for these conditions."
In a study published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, Dr. Khandaker and his colleague, Dr. Stephen Burgess, led a team of Cambridge researchers who examined this link by studying data for nearly 370,000 participants of the British Biobank of middle age.
First, the team examined whether family history of coronary artery disease was badociated with the risk of major depression. They found that people who reported at least one parent who died of heart disease were 20% more likely to develop depression at some point in their lives.
Next, the researchers calculated a genetic risk score for coronary heart disease, a measure of the contribution of different genes known to increase the risk of heart disease. Heart disease is a so-called "polygenic" disease. In other words, it is not caused by a single genetic variant, but rather by a large number of genes, each of which increases the chances of developing heart disease. In contrast to family history, researchers found no strong badociation between genetic predisposition to heart disease and the likelihood of suffering from depression.
Together, these results suggest that the link between heart disease and depression can not be explained by a genetic predisposition common to both diseases. This instead implies that something about the environment of an individual – such as the risk factors to which he is exposed – not only increases his risk of heart disease, but also increases his risk of depression.
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