New discovery about depression

Introduction

It’s been months we are dealing with COVID-19. It has indeed affected our lifestyles in various ways, plus it has added fear and anxiety to all of us. Even though we all know how self-isolating is important, we have to admit that it may cause loneliness and depression. So as a medical student, I started to read more about this, and I came across this recent study about how you can predict depression from heart rate. I’ll reference the website below so you can take a look. Meanwhile, I’ll briefly go over this study and mention their findings.

So let’s dive in.

What is depression

Depression is a mood disorder that can cause not only physical symptoms such as backache, headache, and digestive problems but also anxiety, lethargy, and sadness. It’s worth mentioning, if you have depression you might suffer from sleeping and concentrating problems. However, we all experience all these symptoms multiple times in our lifetime. We can get sad because of an exam but then we get over it after a couple of days. Only when a person has these symptoms every day and at least for 2 weeks, they can be classified as depressed and require professional help.

The Link between heart rate and depression

Heart rate is defined as the number of the times your heart beats per minute. It’s interesting to know depression can elevate your heart rate and reduce heart rate variation. So the patients don’t only have an increased heart rate during the day but also at night when they are relaxing.

There is a hypothesis about it that ‘‘ inflammation and increased levels of some hormones could prevent the heart from being able to maintain a regular rhythm’’.

The result of the study suggested that if you have depression symptoms they can tell with 90% accuracy whether you are depressed by measuring your heart rate for 24 hours.

If you are interested in more information I encourage you to read the study.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/heart-rate-could-predict-depression-risk

Conclusion

To put it in a nutshell, this pandemic has caused so much anxiety among us and we need to be aware of not only our physical health but also mental health. During social distancing try to find a hobby that makes you feel happy. For more details please give some time to read our previous blog about some tips that can make you feel happy during COVID-19

https://medxadventures.wixsite.com/medxadventures/post/how-to-feel-happy-during-covid-19

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Medxadventures