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Breathing problems at night 'increase depression risk'
20 September 2006
People with sleep-related breathing disorders have an increased risk of becoming depressed, according to a new study in the US.
Problems such as laboured and interrupted breathing during the night have previously been linked to health issues such as cardiovascular disease. But new research, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, indicates that people with a breathing disorder are also more likely to become depressed.
The team studied 1,408 participants, all of whom were aged between 30 and 60 at the beginning of the project in 1988. Every four years, these participants spent one night in a sleep laboratory, where their sleep was monitored for breathing problems.
By 2005 the participants had completed a total of 3,202 sleep studies. The results showed that participants with minimal sleep-related breathing problems (that is, having an average of five incidents of reduced or paused breathing per night) were 1.6 times more likely to develop depression than those without breathing difficulties.
The risk of depression was shown to increase with the severity of breathing problems - participants with moderate or worse cases were 2.6 times as likely to develop the depression.
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