Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Cardiol. Sep 26, 2016; 8(9): 547-552
Published online Sep 26, 2016. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v8.i9.547
Depression risk in patients with coronary heart disease in Germany
Marcel Konrad, Louis Jacob, Michael A Rapp, Karel Kostev
Marcel Konrad, Department of Health, Fresenius University, 65510 Idstein, Germany
Louis Jacob, Department of Biology, École Normale Supérieure, 69007 Lyon, France
Michael A Rapp, Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany
Karel Kostev, Department of Epidemiology, IMS Health, 60598 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Author contributions: Konrad M designed and performed the research and wrote the paper; Jacob L designed the research; Rapp MA designed the research and provided clinical advice; Kostev K performed the analysis and supervised the report.
Institutional review board statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the IMS Health.
Informed consent statement: Patients were not required to give informed consent to the study because the analysis used anonymous data.
Conflict-of-interest statement: We have no financial relationships to disclose.
Data sharing statement: Technical details and statistical methods are available with the corresponding author at kkostev@de.imshealth.com.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Karel Kostev, DMSc, PhD, Professor, Department of Epidemiology, IMS Health, Frankfurt am Main, Darmstädter Landstr, 60598 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. kkostev@de.imshealth.com
Telephone: +49-69-66044878 Fax: +49-69-66045878
Received: May 5, 2016
Peer-review started: May 9, 2016
First decision: June 13, 2016
Revised: July 12, 2016
Accepted: July 29, 2016
Article in press: August 1, 2016
Published online: September 26, 2016
Processing time: 137 Days and 5 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: This is a retrospective study to determine the prevalence of depression and its risk factors among patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) treated in German primary care practices. Fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-two patients with CHD from German primary care practices were included and matched to 59992 controls. After a five-year follow-up, 21.8% of the CHD group and 14.2% of the control group were diagnosed with depression. In the multivariate regression model, CHD was a strong risk factor for developing depression.