Depression

Depressed? Try a daily calcium supplement with your Prozac. The psychic pain may--literally--be cutting you through the bone. A team of German scientists has found that depression may cause osteoporosis. It's long been known that depression cranks up secretion of the stress hormone corti-sol. And cortisol reduces the bone density. But it took a controlled study of 80 depressed patients, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, to make the link. "We were not certain whether the increased corti-sol secretion in depression was enough to cause any alteration in bone metabolism," says Ulrich Schweiger, M.D., of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. But after controlling for the known risk factors of osteoporosis--old age, smoking, being a woman, lack of exercise--the depressed patients still had thinner bones than nondepressed controls. Says Schweiger: "Physicians need to educate the public that physical disorders are linked to mental disorders."