Relationship Between Depression And Cognitive Impairment
Certain symptoms of cognitive impairment (psychomotor retardation, loss of affect, concentration, and memory difficulties) are frequent among persons with depression and other mood disorders, and prevalence of both cognitive impairment and depression increases significantly with age (73). People with depression have been shown to perform worse on tests of cognitive performance and neuropsychological measures than non-depressed persons (73).
Similar to the relationship between diabetes and depression, dementia and depression have been closely linked and the directionality of this relationship remains uncertain (31, 73). Depression is highly prevalent among persons with dementia, and several studies have suggested that a history of depression may increase dementia risk.
Volumetric changes of the hippocampus offer one possible explanation of recent findings that depression is a risk factor for dementia. Many patients with MDD report cognitive impairment, even in euthymic states. For example, when compared with controls, euthymic women with recurrent depression showed smaller bilateral hippocampal volumes and lower verbal memory scores, a neuropsychological measure of hippocampal function (74). Further, the severity of deficits correlates with total number of depressive episodes (75), and a smaller hippocampus, especially on the left, is predictive of incident dementia at 5-year follow-up in older depressed persons (76).
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