Depression worsens health of adult asthmatics

	Tweet

Adults with asthma often experience depressive symptoms, which are linked to more severe asthma and poorer health overall, researchers report.

“Although depression is treatable, its impact on longitudinal asthma outcomes is not clear.” Dr. Mark D. Eisner, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues write in the medical journal Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.

The researchers examined the impact of depressive symptoms on outcomes and frequency of emergency health care use in 743 adult asthmatics. The subjects were recruited after being hospitalized for asthma and were followed for longer than 2 years.

The researchers documented depression in 18 percent of the participants.

After accounting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and smoking, depressive symptoms were linked to greater severity-of-asthma scores.

Depression was also associated with poorer asthma-specific quality of life, poorer physical health status, more frequent emergency department visits and more additional hospitalizations.

Eisner’s group notes that symptoms of depression “are often unrecognized or untreated.” They conclude, “Screening and treating of depression may improve asthma-specific outcomes.”

SOURCE: Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, May 2005.

RELATED STORIES:
Study links depression in women with chronic pain to greater incidence of disability   Gene variation makes alcoholism less likely in some survivors of sexual abuse   Toxoplasmosis: The Strain Explains Severity of Infection   Prepared Patient: Managing Mental and Medical Illness   Psychiatrists condemn Cruise mental health remarks   Mental illness alone not a trigger for violence   Depression Raises Risk of Death for Heart Attack Patients Years After Attack   Depression saps endurance of the brain’s reward circuitry   Sense of Taste Different in Women with Anorexia Nervosa   Music can alleviate chronic pain and depression   Hyperbaric treatment shows promise for autism   Individuals With Social Phobia See Themselves Differently   Teen boys who attempted suicide more like to abuse partners as adults   Consider ADHD starting at age four: doctor group   Ageing and mental health problems in people with intellectual disability

Comments

[ + Post Your Own ]

Now you're in the public comment zone. What follows is not Armenian Medical Network's stuff; it comes from other people and we don't vouch for it. A reminder: By using this Web site you agree to accept our Terms of Service. Click here to read the Rules of Engagement.

There are no comments for this entry yet. [ + Comment here + ]