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(Stroke. 2005;36:98.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.
Original Contributions |
From the Department of Psychology (B.B.G.), State University of New York at Oswego, NY; the Department of Psychiatry (K.M.), University of Pittsburgh, Penn; the Division of Biostatistics (L.E.E.), School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and the Department of Epidemiology (Y.C.), University of Pittsburgh, Penn.
Correspondence to Dr Brooks B. Gump, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126. E-mail gump{at}oswego.edu
| Abstract |
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Methods 12 866 men without definite evidence of CHD at study entry but who had above average risk of CHD based on blood pressure, blood cholesterol levels, and/or cigarette smoking were recruited into the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT). Survivors at the end of the trial were followed-up for mortality for an additional 18 years. Men who had completed the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale near the end of the trial (n=11 216) were used in a prospective analysis of post-trial all-cause and cause-specific mortality during 18-year follow-up after CES-D assessment.
Results Greater depressive symptoms measured at the end of the trial were associated with significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality and for cause-specific death, a higher risk of CVD, and, more specifically, stroke mortality (all P values <0.02) but not CHD mortality (P=0.48) in linear trend analyses. The significant associations were strongest for those reporting the greatest depression: hazard ratio (HR)=1.15 (95% CI, 1.03 to 1.28; P<0.01) for all-cause mortality for those in the highest depressive symptom quintile, HR=1.21 for CVD mortality (95% CI, 1.03 to 1.41; P<0.05), and HR=2.03 for stroke mortality (95% CI, 1.20 to 3.44; P<0.01) compared with those in the lowest quintile. These associations were adjusted for age, intervention group, race, educational attainment, smoking at baseline and visit 6, trial averaged systolic blood pressure, alcohol consumption, and fasting cholesterol, as well as the occurrence of nonfatal cardiovascular events during the trial.
Conclusions Greater depressive symptoms are associated with an increase in the risk of all-cause and, more specifically, CVD mortality in men. Stroke but not CHD was the form of CVD with which depressive symptoms were associated.
Key Words: cardiovascular diseases depression stroke
| Introduction |
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Although a number of studies have considered the association of depressive symptoms with all-cause and cause-specific mortality,9 there are benefits to testing these associations in the MRFIT. First, the MRFIT is the only depressionCVD study to date with a lengthy mortality follow-up of 18 years. Second, relative to previous studies, the MRFIT data can provide a more reliable assessment of risk factors (eg, smoking, cardiac disease) by considering 6 yearly assessments throughout the trial. Third, there is nearly 100% ascertainment of mortality in MRFIT. Finally, depressive symptoms were measured during the sixth year of this 7-year trial using a well-standardized measure, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D10).
| Methods |
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Assessment of Depressive Symptoms
Depressive symptoms were assessed with the CES-D scale administered during the sixth annual examination. Because of death and attrition, the CES-D was administered to 11 263 of the original 12 866 participants. The CES-D consists of 20 questions about the frequency of experiencing certain feelings or symptoms during the last week on a 4-point scale ranging from 0 (rarely or none of the time [<1 day]) to 3 (most or all of the time [5 to 7 days]). Higher scores indicate more depressive symptoms, with a maximum score of 60. The CES-D has excellent internal consistency (average, 0.87) and reasonable testretest reliability (average 0.5710). In the current sample, CES-D scores (M=7.23, SD=6.84) were positively skewed (ie, more high scores than expected around the sample mean). We chose to analyze depressive symptom quintiles rather than treat CES-D as a continuous measure for a number of reasons. First, the interpretation of individual CES-D scores is not advisable.10 Second, CES-D scores are positively skewed in the general population and in the MRFIT. Finally, quintiles provide enough groups to detect any important nonlinearity but not so many that group Ns become too small.
Risk Factor Assessment
The following risk factors were considered: age at study entry, MRFIT group assignment (SI versus usual care), race (white versus nonwhite), educational attainment (on a 7-point scale), occurrence of a nonfatal CVD event during the preceding year, cigarette smoking (cigarettes per day at baseline and smoking status as yes/no at year 6), and, from each annual examination before CES-D assessment, trial averages of systolic blood pressure, fasting cholesterol concentration, and alcohol use (drinks/week). A nonfatal CVD event during the trial was defined as angina, intermittent claudication,13 congestive heart failure, peripheral arterial occlusive disease, left ventricular hypertrophy by electrocardiogram, impaired renal function, accelerated hypertension, coronary artery bypass surgery, stroke, or definite clinical myocardial infarction (MI); nonfatal CVD events were not assessed after the end of the trial. Further details regarding these assessments are published elsewhere.14
Mortality Ascertainment
Before the end of the trial on February 28, 1982, deaths were ascertained using next-of-kin interviews, follow-up of missed clinic visits, responses to postcards sent to usual care participants, and searches of publicly accessible files of deceased persons. For deaths through December 1990, vital status was ascertained by matching participants identifying information with the National Death Index or Social Security Administration files. To determine cause of death, death certificates were coded independently by 2 nosologists using the ICD-9,15 with disagreements adjudicated by a third nosologist. The latest search of the National Death Index was for all deaths January 1991 through December 1999 using National Death Index -Plus to obtain death dates and primary cause. Mortality follow-up is considered to be essentially 100% complete.16
Statistical Analyses
Participant characteristics were analyzed across CES-D quintiles. Mortality after the CES-D assessment was analyzed using Cox proportional hazard regression models (stratified by clinical center) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the hazard ratios (HRs) associated with each depressive symptom quintile. To control for possible confounding variables, multivariate adjusted analyses included the risk factors described. Additional covariate control for use of beta-blockers, body mass index, fasting glucose, use of medications for diabetes, dietary cholesterol, sodium, saturated fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids neither appreciably nor significantly altered results, and those results are not discussed further.
Different analytic approaches addressed specific hypotheses. First, we considered the HR associated with each CES-D quintile (relative to the lowest quintile) and corresponding linear trends across quintiles. A linear trend analysis specifically tests the hypothesis that increasing depressive symptoms across quintile groups are associated with a consistent and linear increase in the risk of mortality. This approach addresses associations of mortality with depressive symptoms but not clinical depression. The relatively low incidence of CES-D scores at 16 or >16 in the MRFIT (n=1103; 9.78%), indicative of moderate symptoms,10 led to using this clinical cutoff (
16 versus <16 on the CES-D) in secondary analyses. Additional analyses tested the interaction between CES-D quintiles and occurrence of a nonfatal CVD event to address whether the depressionmortality association varied in magnitude according to CVD events during the trial. Finally, we analyzed separately those who did not have a nonfatal CVD event during the trial.
| Results |
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Post-Trial Mortality
The median length of follow-up for the 11 216 men from CES-D assessment through December 31, 1999 was 18.43 years. During this time, 1788 cardiovascular and 1909 noncardiovascular deaths occurred. Using the linear trend results shown in Table 2, the unadjusted HR associated with more depressive symptoms was significant for all-cause mortality (HR, 1.05 for each higher quintile; 95% CI, 1.03 to 1.07; P<0.001). When considering cause-specific mortality, CVD (HR, 1.06; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.10; P=0.001) and, specifically, stroke (HR, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.05 to 1.31; P=0.005) were associated with significantly higher risks for men with higher CES-D scores. Finally, men with higher CES-D scores had a significantly greater risk of non-CVD mortality in the unadjusted model (HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.07; P=0.025).
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After the addition of covariates, more depressive symptoms were still associated with a significantly increased post-trial risk for all-cause (HR, 1.03 for each higher quintile; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.06; P=0.011), CVD (HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.08; P=0.013), and stroke (HR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.07 to 1.34; P=0.002) mortality. However, more depressive symptoms were no longer significantly associated with non-CVD mortality (HR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.05; P=0.371). The HRs for stroke mortality across depressive symptom quintiles are shown in Figure 1. The significant linear trend suggests that each quartile increase in depression symptoms is associated with an incremental increase in the risk of stroke mortality. A quadratic term was not significant (P>0.50) in this analysis and the pattern of HRs across quintiles in Figure 1 suggest there is no threshold above which the effect of depressive symptoms emerges. In the analysis of stroke mortality, the following covariates had significant HRs: serum cholesterol (HR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.002 to 1.106; P=0.04), age at study entry (HR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.08 to 1.15; P<0.0001), visit-6 cigarette smoking (HR, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.03 to 2.30; P=0.03), and systolic blood pressure (HR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.03 to 1.06; P<0.0001).
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In secondary analyses, clinical depression (CES-D >16) was associated with significantly greater risk of all-cause mortality (HR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.01 to 1.24; P=0.03) and, more specifically, a marginally elevated risk of stroke (HR, 1.48; 95% CI, 0.93 to 2.36; P=0.097) and non-CVD mortality (HR, 1.14; 95% CI, 0.99 to 1.32; P=0.070) in fully adjusted models. These effects were comparable to the effects when considering depressive symptom quintiles, although significance was attenuated.
Because the proportion of men with a nonfatal CVD event differed by quintile of depressive symptoms, for each cause of death, an interaction term between CES-D and occurrence of a nonfatal CVD event was fit; none was significant (all P values >0.05, not shown). Similarly, analyses excluding those with a during-trial nonfatal CVD event showed similar results but were less statistically significant (data not shown).
| Discussion |
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Although a number of studies show that greater depression is associated with a significantly higher risk of all-cause and CVD mortality,1 the literature is less clear on the question of whether CHD or stroke are the specific CVD causes associated with depressive symptoms. For example, in a recent review9 of 13 studies that have addressed the association between depressive symptoms and heart disease in patients without existing heart disease, only 1 study20 tested the association of depressive symptoms with stroke. Moreover, this study reported a significant relative risk (RR) for stroke mortality (RR, 1.21; P=0.001; from 204 deaths) but a nonsignificant RR for MI mortality (RR, 1.14; P=0.11; from 126 deaths). The difference in significance is partially a function of more stroke events relative to MIs and therefore greater power in the analysis of stroke. Studies evaluating specific types of CVD restrict their focus to either stroke17 or CHD,21 without ascertaining both CHD and stroke within a single study, making it difficult to evaluate the relative importance of CHD and stroke to the CVDdepression association. The exception is the recent report from the Womens Health Initiative Observational Study (WHI-OS)22 showing that among women with a history of CVD, depressive symptoms measured by a shortened version of the CES-D predicted stroke incidence but no other form of CVD. In contrast, among women with no history of CVD, depressive symptoms were not related to stroke, CHD, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease incidence but were related to CVD death. The current study suggests that stroke is the form of CVD most strongly associated with depressive symptoms, especially among persons at high risk. The fact that a significant CHDdepression association was observed in our unadjusted models suggests that perhaps insufficient control for confounding variables accounts for previous findings of a CHDdepression association.
This study has limitations. First, findings are restricted to men at high risk for CHD. The relative strength of the depressionstroke association may be unique to populations with a high prevalence of hypertension (eg, MRFIT men or WHI-OS women with no history of CVD) and thereby not generalize to other more normotensive populations. Second, the assessment of depressive symptoms occurred near the end of MRFIT and by this time, some participants were no longer free from CVD (22%); therefore, our current findings may not generalize to other prospective studies of depression in those initially free of CVD. This possibility is unlikely, however, because the depressionCVD association in the present study was not significantly qualified by whether the participants had a history of CVD. Finally, although all analyses included a number of covariate measures with particular attention to CVD risk factors, unmeasured factors (eg, silent strokes) might have contributed to an increased risk of depressive symptoms and CVD mortality.
Clinical Implications and Conclusions
More depressive symptoms in men with above average risk of CHD mortality were associated with a significantly greater risk of CVD mortality during an 18-year post-trial period. The association was primarily with stroke mortality, and not with CHD mortality or its components. Finding this association in the context of controls for numerous potential confounders provides more evidence of a causal link between depressive symptoms and stroke mortality in particular. The clinical implications of a dose-dependent (eg, linear) association suggest that any reduction in depressive symptoms in those at above average risk for CHD may potentially result in a corresponding decline in future stroke mortality. Moreover, as measured by the
2 test statistic, the magnitude of the effect of depressive symptoms on stroke mortality is greater than smoking and cholesterol but not as large as age or blood pressure. As previously noted with cholesterol and blood pressure,23 population-wide reductions in depressive symptoms might provide the greatest reductions in CVD. Physicians ability and willingness to assess depression in patients at higher risk for CHD and implement the corresponding psychosocial interventions as part of the medical management might thereby affect the clinical course of stroke.24
| Acknowledgments |
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Received June 21, 2004; revision received August 28, 2004; accepted October 6, 2004.
| References |
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