At this time, the most general conclusions from the available literature must be that medical illness can be both a cause and a consequence of depression, and that treatment of depression, regardless of the clinical context in which it occurs, can have a positive effect on quality of life, functioning,

and health. Moreover, current knowledge in this area should serve to guide further research to develop novel treatments, improve the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical effectiveness of established treatments, and provide insight into pathogenic mechanisms. Psychiatric-medical comorbidity is important at several levels. Pragmatically, it can affect the click here recognition, diagnosis, treatment, and delivery of care for patients with depression. More conceptually, it can affect the mechanisms responsible for the pathog enesis of depression and for its impact as a multisystem disease. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Among the early findings that established geriatric psychiatry as an important field of scientific inquiry were those of Stenstedt,2 Hopkinson,3 and Mendlewicz4 demonstrating that

elderly patients with depression could Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical be divided into two subgroups, early-onset dépressives, whose late-life depression was a recurrence of a disorder that had its initial onset earlier in life, and late-onset dépressives, for whom depression began for the first time in late life. These groups differed in terms of family histories and genetic risk for depression, with an excess of depression among first-degree relatives for the early-onset dépressives. In contrast, the late-onset dépressives had an excess of other Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical factors, especially chronic medical illness, suggesting that physical illness could play an important role in the pathogenesis of those depressions that occur for the first time in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical later life. Although these findings have had an enormous impact on subsequent research, identification of the path from physical illness to depression represents

only one of the factors linking depression and medical illness. Another body of work has demonstrated the importance of the mirror image path, that proceeding from depression to medical illness. In his prospective study of a cohort of college students from the 1940s, Vaillant found that there was an association between depression and chronic, disabling enough illnesses in his subjects when they reached their seventies.5 However, contrary to what one may have expected, he found that this association could be explained by the increased incidence of chronic disease and disability among those who, earlier in life, had exhibited evidence of depression, litis finding reinforces epidemiological findings suggesting that patients with depression exhibit a higher subsequent incidence of diabetes6 and an increased number of first myocardial infarctions,7-11 as well as clinical research findings that women with depression experience an accelerated rate of osteoporosis.