Song EK, et al. – The intent of this paper was to discern the associations among vitamin D deficiency, depressive symptoms and cardiac events. The data displayed that both Vitamin D deficiency and depressive symptoms speculated shorter cardiac event–free survival. Depressive symptoms did not predict cardiac events in heart failure (HF) patients with vitamin D adequacy. Somatic depressive symptoms predicted vitamin D deficiency. However, this was not seen in cognitive depressive symptoms. Advanced studies were necessitated to investigate the protective role of vitamin D in the relationship between somatic depressive symptoms and cardiac events.

Methods

• 204 HF patients completed a 3-day food diary to gauge the average daily intake of vitamin D.
• Patients completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for evaluating the somatic and cognitive depressive symptoms.
• They were categorized into 2 groups via the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 cut-point score of 10 (< 10, no depressive symptoms; ≥ 10, depressive symptoms).
• Data on cardiac events during 1 year were extracted from medical record review.
• Hierarchical Cox and logistic regressions analyzed the data.

Results

• 60 patients (29.4%) reported depressive symptoms and 106 (52.0%) presented with vitamin D deficiency.
• Depressive symptoms (hazard ratio [HR], 1.93; P = .031) and vitamin D deficiency (HR, 1.84, P = .036) speculated shorter cardiac event–free survival in Cox regression.
• Depressive symptoms appeared to predict shorter cardiac event–free survival in patients with vitamin D deficiency (HR, 2.16; P = .038), but not those with vitamin D adequacy.
• Somatic depressive symptoms exhibited a link with vitamin D deficiency (odds ratio, 1.12; P = .028) in logistic regression.
• However, this was not seen in cognitive depressive symptoms.