NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with a constellation of diabetes and heart disease risk factors known as the metabolic syndrome are more likely to be depressed than people who are free from these risk factors, Australian researchers report.

The findings are important, Dr. James A. Dunbar of the Flinders and Deakins Universities in Victoria and colleagues say, because depressed people may have a harder time making the changes in lifestyle that are necessary to reverse the syndrome, which includes large waist circumference, high blood pressure, high blood sugar with probable insulin resistance, high triglyceride levels and low levels of HDL or "good" cholesterol.

Past research has suggested a link between metabolic syndrome and depression, and diabetes is known to boost depression risk, Dunbar and his team note. However, no study to date has investigated the depression-metabolic syndrome link in the general population.

To fill in this knowledge gap, the researchers conducted three surveys among rural Australians 25 to 84 years old, including 1,690 people in all. Of these subjects, 30.4 percent had the metabolic syndrome.

Ten percent of people with the metabolic syndrome had moderate to severe depression compared with 6.9 percent of those without the metabolic syndrome, the researchers found. People with metabolic syndrome also had higher scores for depressive, on average, than people without the syndrome (3.41 vs 2.95, respectively.)

System-wide inflammation, which has been linked to depression and to metabolic syndrome, could be behind this relationship, the researchers suggest in the study, published in the journal Diabetes Care.

They conclude: "Although the association is modest, it is important because of the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndrome and the effect that depression can have on the ability of patients to successfully make lifestyle changes and comply with medication required for hypertension and dyslipidemia."

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, December 2008.

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