Depression May Increase Your Risk of Parkinson’s

(Ivanhoe Newswire) –Depression has been linked to illnesses such as cancer and stroke, but now researchers are saying that people who are depressed may have triple the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan analyzed medical records of 4,634 people with depression and 18, 544 without it for ten years. They also looked at the risk of Parkinson’s disease after excluding people who were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease within two or five years following their depression diagnosis.
During the 10-year follow-up period, 66 people with depression, or 1.42 percent, and 97 without depression, or 0.52 percent, were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. People with depression were 3.24 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those without.
For more information, go to: http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/10/01/WNL.0b013e3182a956ad.short?rss=1
SOURCE: Neurology, October 2013