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Depression increases the risk for somatic disease, just as somatic disease increases the risk for depression. To see how these connections affect death rates, investigators used Danish national registries from 1995 to 2013 on nearly 5 million adults to examine how diagnoses of unipolar depression either prior to or after onset of 19 severe somatic diseases affected mortality.
Somatic diseases involved cardiopulmonary, neurological, renal, endocrine, gastrointestinal, connective tissue, and hematological systems. Analyses adjusted for gender, birth year, year of onset, and presence of the other studied somatic illnesses. Excess mortality was associated with both prior and subsequent depression and was particularly high when depression precede…