Stroke: Study examines risk, risk factors for depression
More than 10 million people had a stroke in 2013 and more than 30 million people worldwide live with a stroke diagnosis. Merete Osler, M.D., D.M.Sc., Ph.D., of Copenhagen University, Denmark, and coauthors used data linked from seven Danish nationwide registers to examine how risk and risk factors for depression differ between patients with stroke and a reference population without stroke, as well as how depression influences death. Among 135,417 patients with stroke, 34,346 (25.4 percent) had a diagnosis of depression within two years after stroke and more than half of the cases of depression (n=17,690) appeared in the first three months after stroke. In a reference population of 145,499 people without stroke, 11,330 (7.8 percent) had a depression diagnosis within two years after entering the study and less than a quarter of the cases (n=2,449) appeared within the first three months, according to the results. The risk of depression in patients during the first three months...