Role of Depression in Diabetes and Osteoporosis

I've usually thought about osteoporosis being a fairly independent thing-you have low calcium intake or other risk factors (age, gender, ethnicity, family history) and you have a higher chance of having lower bone mass. Seems straightforward.

Well, maybe not. A recent study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine recently found that premenopausal women who are depressed have an elevated risk of developing osteoporosis-so much so that the initial findings indicate that clinicians should consider even mild depressive disorder to be a risk factor on par with smoking, low exercise, and low calcium intake. As usual, BBC.com has a good article on the topic.

In addition, a Canadian study looking at SSRI use in post-menopausal women doubled the risk of fracture. This article was also published in the Archives of Internal Medicine back in January. There is also a BBC article on it as well.

Osteoporosis isn't the only disease that is affected by depression-diabetes is as well. A study out of the University of Pennsylvania found that being more aggressive with depression treatment in patients with both depression and diabetes prolonged their lives. It's interesting to not that the patients in the study that died weren't dying of suicide-most were related to cardiovascular death. I was only able to find the abstract out of Diabetes Care on this one, and here's the blog article where I first saw the topic.