July 29, 1997
INSOMNIA IN MEN INCREASES RISK OF DEPRESSION
Sleeping difficulties early in life linked to distress decades later
Young men who report difficulty sleeping are one-and-a-half to two times as likely to experience major depression later in life, according to a new government-funded study by Johns Hopkins researchers.
"We've known that sleep disturbances are among the best biological markers for depression, but this is the first time we've shown that those disturbances can show up decades before the depression," says Dan Ford, M.D., associate professor of internal medicine and author of the study, which appears in this month's issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Ford says the new link could provide doctors opportunities to intervene earlier to reduce depression's effects.
"Not everyone who gets insomnia will eventually get depression," Ford says. "The next step is to try treating young patients who aren't depressed yet, but have a family history of depression and are having sleep disturbances."
Ford and his colleagues analyzed data from the Johns Hopkins Precursor Study, a long-term investigation of 1,053 male medical students at Johns Hopkins. The health of the former students, who were at Hopkins from 1948 to 1964, has been regularly and comprehensively monitored for decades.
Researchers compared men who reported insomnia or other sleeping difficulty in medical school with clinical depression or psychiatric distress later in life.
"Even after we compensated for confounding factors like family history of depression, coffee drinking, or their year in medical school, we still came out with a very clear change in risk," Ford says.
Other authors were Patricia Chang, Lucy Mead, Lisa Cooper-Patrick and Michael Klag.
--JHMI--
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