Psychosocial and cognitive determinants of 10-year depressive symptom trajectories in patients with cardiovascular disease: The SMART-Medea Study

Background: Middle-aged and older adults presenting clinically relevant depressive symptoms are often undiagnosed. Understanding the determinants of late-life depressive symptoms could improve prognosis. Further, individuals with manifest cardiovascular disease (CVD) are at an increased risk of depression. This study investigated if psychosocial and cognitive factors are associated with depressive symptom trajectories in individuals with CVD. Methods: Longitudinal data from the SMART-Medea study of 752 participants (median age 62 years, women 18 %) with a history of CVD was used. Psychosocial determinants (i.e., history of depression, anxiety, neuroticism, locus of control, adverse childhood events, recent adverse events, social support, and somatization) and cognition (i.e., memory functioning, working memory, executive functioning, and processing speed) were assessed via multinomial logistic regressions with depressive symptoms trajectories as outcome (i.e., “never depressed” (reference), “energy/sleep difficulties”, “mild depressive symptoms” and “fluctuating severe depression”). Depressive symptom trajectories were based off of longitudinal PHQ-9 scores and created using latent class analysis. Analyses were adjusted for age, sex/gender, and education. Results: All psychosocial factors were associated with depressive symptom trajectories, except for social support, with increasing associations from the “energy/sleep difficulties” to the “fluctuating severe depression”. For cognitive factors, only memory functioning was associated with decreased odds of “fluctuating severe depression” (OR = 0.63, 95 % CI = 0.47–0.85). Limitations: The study population consisted of mostly white male participants with CVD; thus, the generalizability to other populations is low. Conclusions: Our findings emphasize that a wide range of psychosocial factors are associated with mild as well as severe trajectories of depressive symptoms in patients with manifest CVD. Focusing on psychosocial factors could improve one's prognosis of depressive symptomology.