Depression Common After Stroke
April 2, 2004 - ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who have suffered a stroke often have depressive symptoms, according to researchers. The time course of these symptoms varies and depends on the patient's mental functioning.
Dr. D. Leys, of the University of Lille in France, and colleagues examined 202 stroke patients for depressive symptoms and followed them for more than three years.

Patients with scores of at least 7 on an established depression rating scale were considered to have depressive symptoms. The researchers used other assessment scales to measure how much their mental and physical capacities had been affected by the stroke, their functional outcome, and if they had developed dementia.

Forty-three percent of survivors had depressive symptoms after 6 months; this declined to 36 percent after 12 months, 24 percent after 24 months, and 18 percent after 36 months, according to the researchers' article in the medical journal Neurology.

The only predictor of depressive symptoms at six months was the severity of the neurologic impairment at admission.

The investigators found that younger age and stroke on the right side of the brain were both associated with depressive symptoms at 36 months.

"The time course of the various depressive symptoms differed, sadness remaining frequent 3 years after stroke (50 percent), whereas slowness, psychic slowness, lack of energy, and concentration difficulties remained frequent at month 36 in patients with dementia," Leys's group reports.

The variability between patients "might partly explain the discrepancies observed in previous studies on poststroke depression and associated factors," they note.

SOURCE: Neurology, March 23, 2004.