Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 54, Issue 3, 1 August 2003, Pages 177-180
Biological Psychiatry

Editorial
Mood disorders and medical illness: a major public health problem

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3223(03)00639-5Get rights and content

Section snippets

Burden of mood disorders and medical illness

The functional impairment associated with depression contributes significantly to the economic burden of chronic medical illness. Depression also is becoming recognized as a cause of increased morbidity and mortality in chronic medical illness. As reviewed by Katon (2003), medical costs for patients with major depression are approximately 50% higher than the costs of chronic medical illness alone. In addition, Katon (2003) underscores the equally important, but often less appreciated, effects

Cardiovascular disease

It is now recognized that major depression and bipolar disorder are associated with increased rates of death from coronary heart disease (CHD), and that major depression or depressive symptoms increase the risk of incident CHD (Musselman et al 1998). As reviewed by Rudisch and Nemeroff (2003), as many as 27% of patients with CHD have major depression, but a substantially larger number of cardiac patients have subsyndromal depressive symptoms. Depression is a particularly lethal development for

Cancer

As with cardiovascular disease, there is a large and growing body of evidence in support of a relationship between depression and cancer. Research efforts have focused on depression as a risk factor for cancer, depression as a consequence of cancer, and the dynamics of comorbid depression and cancer. Large population studies suggest that depressed mood or stressful life events may increase the risk of cancer. Although it is acknowledged that these observations of increased risk may be due in

HIV/AIDS

Mood disorders, including depression and mania, are prevalent in persons with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease and may be associated with impaired quality of life, neurocognitive and functional impairment, and poor adherence to antiretroviral therapy. In addition, emerging data suggest that depression is associated with declining CD4 cell counts, accelerated disease progression, and increased mortality. In their paper, Cruess and colleagues (2003) discuss the negative impact of mood

Neurologic disease

This special issue also includes papers devoted to the topics of depression and comorbid neurologic disorders, such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and epilepsy. Of these neurologic disorders, the relationship between mood disorders and cerebrovascular accidents is particularly well-studied. As reviewed by Robinson (2003), depression is common in poststroke patients, with reported prevalence rates of approximately 20%; bipolar disorder is less common. There is no

Call for action

The contributions made by this conference and the papers published in this special issue of Biological Psychiatry should not simply be measured by the quality and quantity of the data, which are impressive. Rather, the strength of this publication also lies in the fact that the views of experts from widely divergent fields of clinical and scientific endeavor resonate along 4 basic themes: 1) Depression is very common in chronic medical illness; 2) Comorbidity with depression inevitably hinders

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Sally K. Laden for editorial support.

Cited by (139)

  • Mood disorders, childhood maltreatment, and medical morbidity in US adults: An observational study

    2020, Journal of Psychosomatic Research
    Citation Excerpt :

    Differences may be due to NESARC including a more heterogeneous and representative presentation of bipolar disorder; differences in measurement of maltreatment (e.g., other studies' severity cut-points for sexual abuse or exploration of dose-response relationships in contrast to our potentially more conservative binary coding of any exposure to sexual abuse); or other differences stemming from sampling design. While a large literature links depression (both the disorder and the syndrome) to medical conditions [6,9,67–69], our findings support pursuing greater understanding of the intersection of mania/hypomania and physical health, underscored by very high medical comorbidity and excess mortality associated with bipolar disorder in clinical and community studies [8,12,70–76]. Future work should focus on understanding the etiology and boundaries of mania and depression in relation to their effects on medical morbidity [77].

  • The relationship between obesity and depressive states

    2020, Revista Medica Clinica Las Condes

  • Neurobiologic properties of mood disorders may have an impact on epilepsy: Should this motivate neurologists to screen for this psychiatric comorbidity in these patients?

    2019, Epilepsy and Behavior

  • Depression among Youth Living with HIV/AIDS

    2019, Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America

  • Attention disorders in adults with epilepsy. Determinants and therapeutic strategies

    2019, Revue Neurologique

  • Epilepsy as a Network Disorder (1): What can we learn from other network disorders such as autistic spectrum disorder and mood disorders?

    2017, Epilepsy and Behavior
View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text
Copyright © 2003 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.