NAKO study confirms link between smoking and depression
The analysis included 173,890 participants between 19 and 72 years, 50 per cent of whom were women. In interviews and using standardised questionnaires, participants reported on doctors’ diagnoses of depression, current depressive symptoms, living conditions and smoking habits. This resulted in three groups: 81,775 never-smokers, 58,004 former smokers and 34,111 current smokers. Current and former smokers also stated the age at which they had started smoking. In addition, the average number of cigarettes smoked per day was recorded – for active smokers and retrospectively for former smokers. For the latter, the time since quitting smoking was also calculated.
The scientists showed that depression was more common among current and former smokers than among never-smokers over the course of their lifetime. “These differences were particularly pronounced in the middle age groups between 40 and 59 years. This underlines that in addition to social factors, temporal effects could play a role in the interaction between smoking and mental health,” says Carolin Marie Callies, doctoral candidate at the Chair of Health Psychology at the University of Mannheim.