Study: Depression Raises Your Risk of Dementia

New research reveals that people with depression are at a higher risk of developing dementia, suggesting that proper treatment of depressive symptoms could lower a person’s risk for cognitive decline later in life.

“We’ve known for a long time that people with some depression are more likely to develop cognitive decline and dementia in old age than people without depression,” the study’s lead author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, neuropsychiatrist at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, told Yahoo Health. “But dementia takes a long time to develop, more than a decade, and there’s been school of thought that depression was perhaps an early sign of the development of dementia and not a true risk factor. Here we show that is definitely not the case.”