Depression and Diabetes

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Anchor lead: Depression and diabetes often go together, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Depression figures large among the many complications of diabetes, yet doesn’t receive the attention of things like cardiovascular disease, eye disease or nerve pain. Sherita Golden, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, says the statistics are daunting.

Golden: Individuals with diabetes are twice as likely to have depression as those who don’t have diabetes and those with diabetes also have twice the likelihood of developing depression over their lifetime compared to people who don’t have diabetes. One of the challenges is that this just hasn’t been discussed as much as the traditional complications but for a number of years it’s been recognized that not only can having depression lead to diabetes or increase your risk but if you have diabetes it increases your risk for subsequent development of depression.  :32

Golden notes that the longer someone has diabetes, even when it’s being treated, the greater the risk. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.