Depression leads to worst health
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Better treatment for depression would improve people's overall health, the researchers concluded in the Lancet.
Experts called for better funding for mental health services.
Dr Somnath Chatterji and colleagues asked people from 60 countries taking part in the World Health Survey a variety of questions about their health, such as how they sleep, how much pain they have, and whether they have any problems with memory or concentration.
Participants were also asked about how they manage with day-to-day tasks.
After taking into account factors such as poverty and other health conditions, the researchers found that depression had the largest effect on worsening health.
And people with depression who also had one or more chronic diseases had the worst health scores of all the diseases looked at or combinations of diseases.
Dr Somnath Chatterji said: "The co-morbid state of depression incrementally worsens health compared with depression alone, with any of the chronic diseases alone, and with any combination of chronic diseases without depression.
"These results indicate the urgency of addressing depression as a public health priority to reduce disease burden and disability, and to improve the overall health of populations."
The team called on doctors around the world to be more alert in the diagnosis and treatment of the condition, noting that it is fairly easy to recognise and treat. (C)BBC
Youth Suicides Increased As Antidepressant Use Fell
By Shankar Vedantam Warnings from federal regulators four years ago that antidepressants were increasing the risk of suicidal behavior among young people led to a precipitous drop in the use of the drugs.
Now a new study has found that the drop coincides with an unprecedented increase in the number of suicides among children.
From 2003 to 2004, the suicide rate among Americans younger than 19 rose 14 percent, the most dramatic one-year change since the government started collecting suicide statistics in 1979, the study found.
The rise followed a sharp decrease in the prescribing of antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil after parents and physicians were confronted by a barrage of warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and international agencies.
The data suggest that for every 20 percent decline in antidepressant use among patients of all ages in the United States, an additional 3,040 suicides per year would occur, said Robert Gibbons, a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who did the study.
About 32,000 Americans commit suicide each year. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said, "We may have inadvertently created a problem by putting a 'black box' warning on medications that were useful." He added, "If the drugs were doing more harm than good, then the reduction in prescription rates should mean the risk of suicide should go way down, and it hasn't gone down at all -- it has gone up."
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