Depression does more damage to a person's health than chronic diseases, media reported on Friday quoting a research paper.
Mental illness has more impact on sufferers general well-being than angina, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes, the paper published in medical journal The Lancet concluded.
Combing through self-reported health data on 245,404 adults from 60 countries collected by the World Health Organization (WHO), researchers found that an average of 3.2 percent of those surveyed had experienced depression over a one-year period.
This was a bit lower than for asthma (3.3 percent), arthritis (4.1 percent), and angina (4.5 percent), and higher than for diabetes (2.0 percent.)
On a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 indicating worst health and 100 indicating best health, sufferers of depression had an average score of 72.9.
This compared with 80.3 for asthmatics, 79.6 for angina sufferers, 79.3 for arthritis sufferers and 78.9 for those with diabetes.
The main findings showed that depression impairs health state to a substantially greater degree than the other diseases, the papaer wroted.
The mental disorder often comes hand-in-hand with other chronic illnesses, and as the world's population lives longer, it is expected to become more and more common.
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