Depression is really bad for general health – worse, in fact, than angina, arthritis, asthma or diabetes – according to widespread reports today (see the BBC for example) on a Lancet paper (you’ll need to register, for free, to read this).

Defining ‘general health’ is a tricky issue, and the researchers had to develop a new questionaire to assess it. They came up with 18 questions in which volunteers ranked whether they had problems with everything from pain to sleep, energy levels, vision, mobility, mental sharpness, interpersonal relations, and ability to look after themselves. Average scores can be found in the paper.

The work urges health care professionals to pay more attention to depression in their patients – particularly those who are also suffering from a chronic physical condition. This is, in fact, the main thrust of the paper: that doctors should be taught not to ignore depression in patients already suffering physically, given the extra dent this has on their health. The researchers suggest that one way to achieve this is to get the (simpler) message out that depression is “a disease at least on a par with physical chronic diseases in damaging health”.

Pulse, a weekly medical news bulletin for UK general practitioners, has flagged this as their ‘paper of the day’, which should help to get the word out.

There is a quick test online to see if you might be suffering from depression on the New York University School of Medicine psychiatry department’s website.

All this seems to go against a study from just last month indicating that doctors are over-diagnosing depression for people who are simply sad, hinting that perhaps some doctors are all too aware of the condition. Getting the balance right might be tricky.