Great article on kids and depressed by Sanjay Gupta at Everyday Health. I was honored to be interviewed for it.
Depression is typically diagnosed in adults, but children also struggle with the condition. New research now indicates those depressed children are more likely to be obese, smoke and not engage in physical activity — all risk factors for heart problems — when they become adolescents.
The new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Pittsburgh revealed that of those depressed in childhood, 22 percent were already obese by age 16, and a third of them smoked cigarettes daily.
This is especially troubling since adolescents who have cardiac risk factors are “much more likely to develop heart disease as adults and even to have a shorter lifespan,” according to the study’s first author Robert M. Carney, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University.
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