The study, financed by the Medical Research Council, was carried out in a wide sample of 2,584 individuals, representative of the aged population of United Kingdom. Five assessments were carried out all through a long monitoring period of 54 months with the aim of assessing the effects of smoking habit and other risk factors of vascular disease (blood pressure, arrythmia, ischemia, body mass index and serum cholesterol levels) in the appearance of new depression cases. To assess such effects, researchers eliminated on the analysis all those participants who suffered from depression at the beggining of the study to make sure that all the cases were new.
The main finding is that smoking cigarettes predisposes to depression regardless of the aforementioned vascular factors, duplicating approximately the risk of suffering from depression throughout the 54 monitoring months.
Another importat result is that low levels of serum cholesterol at the beggining of the study also increase the risk of suffering from depression. Although it had already been established in previous studies, the novelty is that for the first time such finding is inserted in a prospective long-term study dismissing, in addition, the effect of patients´ weight (this way there is no possibility that the finding is due to the fact that depressed individuals eat less). This result tallies with the fact that fatty acids omega 3 and omega 6, necessary for cholesterol synthesis, have been found diminished in numerous studies carried out with depressives; here appears a new preventive measure against depression: consuming diet supplements of such polyunsaturated fatty acids, present, for example, in blue fish.
The relevance of the research work has been proved with its publication in the journal of worldwide renown Psychological Medicine.
Reference: Prof. Jorge Cervilla Ballesteros.
Dpt. of Legal Medicine, Toxicology and Psychiatry.
University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 242017.
E-mail: jacb@ugr.es.
