Increased risk for depression remains after menopause

The risk of a major depressive episode more than doubles for women during and after the menopausal transition, compared with when they were premenopausal, results from a nine-year follow-up study showed.

The finding suggests that clinicians “need to pay attention to depressive symptoms during this time in a woman’s life, and perhaps do a more extensive assessment both in terms of the current presentation and a history of depression, so they have a better understanding of what the overall risk is for a major depressive episode and how they might intervene to prevent it,” the study’s principal investigator said at the annual meeting of the North American Menopause Society.

She and her associates analyzed nine years of follow-up data from 221 premenopausal women enrolled at the Pittsburgh site of the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, a multisite epidemiologic study designed to examine the health of women during midlife. The researchers used the Nonpatient Structured Clinical Interview for Disorders at baseline to determine lifetime history of major depression and annually to assess current and past-year major depression. They classified the women’s status according to self-reported bleeding criteria as premenopausal, perimenopausal, and postmenopausal on hormones.

Covariates included race, history of major depression at baseline, time-varying age, stressful life events as the loss of a spouse or a job, use of psychotropic medications, and hot flashes/night sweats. Women who reported a bilateral oophorectomy or hysterectomy were not included in the analyses after the procedure.

At baseline the women were between the ages of 42 and 53, reported the associate professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. Of the 221 women, 129 (58 percent) transitioned to post menopause over the nine years and 69 (31 percent) experienced at least one major depressive episode. Nearly half of women with a history of a major depression at baseline (47 percent) met criteria for current or past-year major depression, compared with 23 percent of women without a history of major depression at baseline.

Univariate analyses demonstrated that the greatest risk for having a major depressive episode occurred when women were postmenopausal (odds ratio 3.52) or when they were perimenopausal (OR 2.13), compared with when they were premenopausal.

In the fully adjusted multivariate analyses, women remained significantly more likely to have a major depressive episode when they were postmenopausal (OR 3.79) or perimenopausal (OR 2.05). Odd ratios were also significantly greater for African American women (OR 2.10), women with a history of depression (OR 2.97), and women who reported stressful life events (OR 2.90).