Experts explain the connection between depression and cardiovascular diseases: a gene is to blame

The cause of the relationship between disorder and disease has been found

Depression and cardiovascular disease pose a serious public health problem. Approximately 280 million people worldwide suffer from depression, while 620 million people suffer from cardiovascular disease. Scientists have finally been able to find a relationship between these two ailments.

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It has been known since the 1990s that the two diseases are somehow related. For example, people with depression are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, while effective early treatment for depression reduces the risk of subsequent cardiovascular disease by half. Conversely, people with cardiovascular disease are also prone to depression. For these reasons, the American Heart Association (AHA) recommends monitoring depressed adolescents for cardiovascular disease.

What was not yet known was the reason for this apparent relationship between the two diseases. Part of the answer lies in lifestyle factors that are common in patients with depression and that increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, lack of physical activity and poor diet. But it is also possible that both diseases can be connected on a deeper level, through common developmental pathways.

Now scientists have proven that depression and cardiovascular disease actually share some common genetic modules. The finding, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, provides new markers of depression and cardiovascular disease and could ultimately help researchers find drugs to treat both diseases.

“We looked at the gene expression profile in the blood of people with depression and cardiovascular disease and found 256 genes in one gene module that have either higher or lower than average levels of expression that increase the risk of developing both diseases,” said Dr. Binisha H. Mishra.< /p>

The authors define a gene module as a group of genes with similar expression patterns under different conditions and therefore likely to be functionally related.

Mishra and her colleagues examined gene expression data in the blood of 899 women and men aged 34 to 49 who were part of the Young Finns study, which began in 1980 with nearly 4,000 children and adolescents aged three to 18. years, which were randomly selected from five cities in Finland. Since then, the health status of these participants has been continuously monitored.

Finland is estimated to have the highest rate of mental disorders in the EU and has the ninth highest prevalence of depression in the world. At the same time, the country has a relatively low prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, and it is among the 20 percent of the healthiest countries in the world for this class of diseases.

In 2011, blood was also drawn from each participant, and Mishra and colleagues analyzed these samples using state-of-the-art gene expression techniques.

They used advanced statistics to identify 22 different gene modules, of which only one was is associated with both high rates of depressive symptoms and low rates of cardiovascular disease.

“The top three genes from this gene module are known to be associated with neurodegenerative diseases, bipolar disorder and depression. Now we have shown that they are also associated with poor cardiovascular health,” Mishra acknowledged.

These genes are involved in biological processes, such as inflammation, that are involved in the pathogenesis of both depression and cardiovascular disease. vascular diseases. This helps explain why both diseases often occur simultaneously. Other genes in the common module have also been shown to be involved in brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's.