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The study examined the longitudinal association between depression and subsequent violence from three representative samples in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Finland. Researchers for these three cohorts used complementary measures of depression, including self-report and clinical diagnoses, and different measurements of violence including informant reports of violence and official convictions for violent crimes. The research team, led by Professor Seena Fazel, from the Forensic Psychiatry Group at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, found modest increases in risk of violence in depression. In absolute terms, for instance, in the Finnish sample, 7.1% of individuals with depression were convicted of one or more violent crimes, compared with 3.6% in the general population without depression . In relative terms, across samples and measurements, the study shows a consistent pattern of increased relative risk of later violence. In the Dutch and UK samples, an increase in d...

"These findings suggest that a patient's quality of life could be impacted by a diagnostic label and their expectations for the prognosis. So, when a clinician discloses the diagnosis and prognosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment or mild stage Alzheimer's disease, a patient may experience additional symptoms, like anxiety or depression," said the study's lead author, Shana Stites, PsyD, MA, MS, a clinical psychologist in the Penn Memory Center, senior research investigator for the Penn Project on Precision Medicine for the Brain (P3MB). For many years, a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was often not made until a patient had substantial memory and cognitive problems -- by which time patients themselves were often unaware of their diagnosis. Advances in awareness, as well in diagnostic methods, mean doctors are diagnosing Alzheimer's disease earlier, and in the future, routine diagnosis may occur before symptoms even begin. According to Stites, early diagn...