Why the study?
Do chronic, mild depressive symptoms reduce T cell responses to mitogens in community-dwelling older adults?
Do chronic, mild depressive symptoms reduce T cell responses to mitogens in community-dwelling older adults?
Chronic, mild depressive symptoms in older adults are associated with poorer immune function, specifically reduced T cell responses.
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Chronic mild depression was associated with poorer T-cell responses in older adults; hypothesis-generating and requires prospective confirmation before clinical relevance.
In an 18-month prospective study, community-dwelling older adults, including both spousal caregivers of dementia patients and noncaregiving controls, were examined. Participants were selected on the basis of the presence or absence of chronic depressive symptoms that exceeded a cutoff score for clinically relevant depressive symptoms on a self-report symptom measure. Compared with nondepressed older adults, those with chronic, mild depressive symptoms had poorer T cell responses to 2 mitogens from baseline to follow-up. Additionally, among individuals with depressive symptoms, older age was associated with the poorest blastogenic response to the mitogens at follow-up. These findings extend the association between depression and immune function to community-dwelling older adults with chronic, mild depressive symptoms.
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McGuire et al. (2002) studied this question.
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