Depression in adolescents, cancer analytics and screening, saunas and reduced dementia risk, unusual cervical cancer transmission article

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Unknown 0:01

This is an ABC podcast.

Norman Swan 0:06

Hello and welcome to this week's Health Report podcast with me, Norman Swan.

Tegan Taylor 0:10

And me, Tegan Taylor. Now, later on this podcast, we'll have some bonus content for you. Of course, first up is our regular question and answer segment, which, by the way, you can email questions to us, healthreport at abc.net.au.

Norman Swan 0:26

And secondly, we'll have some audio from the health report exactly a year ago where we were talking about this respiratory infection which was running wild. How things have changed. Also today...

Tegan Taylor 0:36

I'll be talking to a researcher about a potentially beneficial link between saunas and dementia...

Norman Swan 0:41

very tangible benefits from bowel cancer screening the curious story of mothers spreading cancer to their babies is it real and the importance of getting on top of depression in young people a huge swedish study of nearly 1.5 million children followed from the age of 5 to 19 and then for many through to the age of 31 has found significant links to physical diseases as well as dying prematurely Marika Leone was the lead author. Marika is a psychiatric epidemiologist at the Institutet Karolinska in Stockholm. Welcome to the Health Report.

Marika Leone 1:14

Yes, hi, thank you. Can you hear me?

Norman Swan 1:16

We can, loud and clear. If you're in the next room, it's just simply wonderful. Marika, how did you do the study?

Marika Leone 1:24

Yes. So we were able to look at the entire Swedish population. As I said, it was a very big study, 1.5 million individuals. So thank you to being Sweden is amazing for this reason. If you are a researcher in epidemiology, especially, they have very big data sets. So we can look up a lot of things that happened during the life of individuals. And that's what we did. So we wanted to screen around, like, in their lifetime, what happened after they got this diagnosis of depression, and we wanted to compare these patients with depression with patients who did not have depression during this young age, so 5 to 19, as you previously mentioned. And then, yeah, we wanted to check the risk of developing a lot of different physical health problems, which has never done before to such extent.

Norman Swan 2:17

Let's just start then. What proportion of these children developed depression in the first 19 years of their life?

Marika Leone 2:25

It was around 37,000 individuals, actually.

Norman Swan 2:31

So I'd say about 2.5% or something like that.

Marika Leone 2:33

Yeah, correct, correct.

Norman Swan 2:35

Were you expecting more or less, or you just took what you got?

Marika Leone 2:40

Well, actually, we were expecting pretty much the same. Other people have checked these registers before, and so the prevalence was around 2.5. So that's what we were expecting. But, of course, it is important to say that these most likely are the most severe cases. So they want to get attention to clinics, to doctors. So the proportion might be higher. We're looking at the most severe cases.

Norman Swan 3:07

And that would include bipolar disorder as they got into adolescence?

Marika Leone 3:11

Yeah, we looked specifically at depression and then in some analysis, so the term is adjusting for or controlling for bipolar. So just to make sure that we could get, you know, an indication of what was happening for depression only when we take into consideration bipolar, schizophrenia and other disorders.

Norman Swan 3:35

So you looked at 69 physical diseases as well as dying prematurely. What did you find?

Marika Leone 3:41

Well, the risk was increased for basically all of them apart, maybe for two. So 67, 68, like all of them were like significantly. So these kids get higher risk for most of them. Specifically, intentional self-harm was quite high. So around 14 times higher risk. when you compare these kids with the ones that have not been diagnosed with depression, eight-time increase of sleep disorders, six-fold increased risk of viral hepatitis and other things. And in terms of mortality, there was a six-time increased risk for dying for any cause. And then when we look at specific cause, of course, like, again, like intentional cepham was the leading cause, around 14 times increased risks.

Norman Swan 4:32

Of suicide. Now, some of the things don't necessarily make sense. So sleep disorders, you can understand.