Diabetes: Living Longer With Antidepressants

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

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People with diabetes are more likely to develop depression at the same time. Antidepressants can save your life.

There are a number of reasons for the connection between diabetes and depression. The knowledge that with diabetes is an incurable disease with possible serious consequential damage is quite stressful. But the connection is also the other way round: More people with depression develop diabetes than those who are mentally healthy.

Stress hormones play a central role in the interaction. They can fuel subliminal inflammatory processes that favor diabetes, but also contribute to mental illness.

Double the risk of depression

In fact, the risk of depression for people with diabetes is about twice as high as for people with healthy sugar metabolism. In particular, severe depression is more common in comparison. "Both diseases independently contribute to higher mortality," explains study director Hong-Ming Chen from Chang Gung University in Taiwan.

Diabetics can die from the disturbed blood sugar levels either directly or indirectly as a result of secondary diseases such as cardiovascular diseases. People with depression are not only at increased risk of suicide. Due to the constant stress, they also tend to lead an unhealthy lifestyle with high alcohol consumption and smoking, poor nutrition and too little exercise.

Reduced risk of death

Antidepressants can significantly reduce the risk of premature death among patients with both diseases, the researcher and his team have found. To this end, they evaluated the data of more than 50,000 people over a period of 13 years who suffered from both diseases. Antidepressants were therefore able to reduce the risk of dying during this period by 35 percent.

One possible explanation would be that the drug-relieved depression enables patients to take better care of themselves and thus also their diabetes. Improved blood sugar levels and a reduced death rate in this way alone would be a very welcome side effect of the brightened state of mind.

Targeted research into depression in diabetes

The researchers point out that special care should be taken in diabetics to identify accompanying depression and treat it accordingly.

In Germany, 7.2 percent of adults currently live with diabetes. That's around six million people. Around 20 to 25 percent of them also suffer from depression at least in phases.

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