Depressive Symptoms in Women Linked to Risk for Metabolic Syndrome

April 4, 2007 — Women with high levels of depressive symptoms have an increased risk of developing metabolic syndrome, according to the results of a prospective cohort study reported in the April issue of Diabetes Care.
"A large body of literature suggests that psychosocial attributes and stressful events predict incidence of CVD [cardiovascular disease] and type 2 diabetes," write Katri Räikkönen, PhD, from the University of Helsinki in Finland, and colleagues. "Despite the plausible roles of psychosocial factors, research devoted to testing whether they also predict the metabolic syndrome is scanty.... We evaluated whether psychosocial factors that are related to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes predict prospectively the risk for the metabolic syndrome using the different clinical criteria available for defining the syndrome."