Associations between age and the course of major depressive disorder: a 2-year longitudinal cohort study.

Background: Although there is some evidence that older people might have a poorer course of major depressive disorder (MDD) than younger or middle-aged people, and that age-related course differences might affect the optimisation of MDD treatment, large-scale studies with a broad age range, including consistent course assessments, are needed to properly address this issue. Therefore, we aimed to longitudinally examine whether older age was associated with a poorer naturalistic course trajectory of MDD than that of younger ages and to establish which prognostic-clinical, social, and health-factors could explain this potentially poorer course.

Methods: For this longitudinal cohort study, we used baseline and 2-year follow-up data from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) and the Netherlands Study of Depression in Older Persons (NESDO) cohorts.

Does the presence of multiple sclerosis impact on symptom profile in depressed patients?

Objective: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is common in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) but may remain unrecognized because of overlapping symptoms and different presentation due to its specific MS-related neurobiological aetiology. We aimed to investigate the clinical profile of MDD in MS.

Methods: In a sample of MDD patients with MS (n=83) and without MS (n=782), MDD characteristics, 30 depressive symptoms, and sum scores of cognitive, somatic, atypical and melancholic symptom clusters were compared using logistic regression analyses and analysis of co-variance.

Risk Factors for Depression: Differential Across Age?

Introduction: The occurrence of well-established risk factors for depression differs across the lifespan. Risk factors may be more strongly associated with depression at ages when occurrence, and therefore expectance, is relatively low ("on-time off-time" hypothesis). This large-scale study examined absolute and relative risks of established risk factors for depression across the lifespan.

The influence of childhood abuse on cortisol levels and the cortisol awakening response in depressed and nondepressed older adults.

Objectives: Childhood abuse has been associated with depression in later life. This may be related to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning. Therefore we aimed to examine the impact of childhood abuse and its interaction with depression on cortisol levels in older adults.

Early and recent psychosocial stress and telomere length in older adults.

Background: Psychosocial stress has been associated with an increased risk for mental and somatic health problems across the life span. Some studies in younger adults linked this to accelerated cellular aging, indexed by shortened telomere length (TL). In older adults, the impact of psychosocial stress on TL may be different due to the lifetime exposure to competing causes of TL-shortening.

Leukocyte telomere length and late-life depression.

Objective: Depressive disorders have been associated with increased risk for aging-related diseases, possibly as a consequence of accelerated cellular aging. Cellular aging, indexed by telomere length (TL) shortening, has been linked to depression in adults younger than 60 years; however, it remains unclear whether this is the case in late-life depression (age >60 years). The objective of this study was to assess differences in TL between persons with current late-life depression and never-depressed comparisons and to examine the association between characteristics of late-life depression and TL.