Depression can play direct role in developing type 2 diabetes, says study | Hacker News Reader

Depression can play direct role in developing type 2 diabetes, says study

theguardian.com

27 pointsvoisin10 comments

I honestly wonder how many of these types of studies aren't taking into account the other variables. Such as, low cardiorespiratory fitness leading to depression, or poor diet which obviously leads to diabetes, which means depression obviously can lead to diabetes. How much is causation versus correlation? The entire article goes beats around the bush until it finally admits, "And while a direct cause was not found for diabetes causing depression, experts still believe that the burden of living with type 2 diabetes may be a factor in developing depression." Basically all this research found was the people with obesity likely have depression and 37% of people with obesity have diabetes. The title is complete click-bait.

Because mental illnesses are a throwaway diagnoses for the doctor to say "nah, whatever, this is on you, think healthier and go take a pill for your symptoms we won't be doing any more diagnosis".

It seems much more likely that things like sleep disruption, persistent inflammation(gut dysbiosis, misc infections), metabolic disturbance(brain isn't getting enough energy to do its job) are causative of depression which manifests as reduced tolerance to stressful life events and ability to manage one's life, to me.

But instead we get the thought-terminating cliche of "depression causes everything else, so just go to therapy and stop looking for health problems"

Did you get to the actual study ? I couldn't, and these kind of articles are usually cutting important details off making them basically useless to properly understand what's at stake.

The research: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.06.22283143v...

I will never understand at which point it became preferable to post an editorial written by a random journalist, which doesn't even link at all to the actual research paper. It's a proven way to propagate misrepresented science. (And no, the interview quotes are not a defense; it has also, often been the case, that the authors would carefully choose their wording to mislead public's perception.)

Yeah, I see this quite a fair bit from The Guardian. A recent example [0] that was called out here [1] and a recent discussion on HN here [2].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-r...

[1] https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/stories-are-bad-for-your-intell...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37373257

Maybe it’s the other way around, less insulin means less glicose would enter brain cells, affecting the production of neurotransmitters…

Maybe sugar levels are still good on blood samples, but the first signal of reduced insulin could come from the brain health…

According to James Nestor, author of "Breath", depression leads to unhealthy breathing which in turn leads to bad support for the body. Because of that a list of modern illnesses benefits from a bad breathing. Sorry for my bad wording, I hope I got the point across.

I missed any link to the actual study (and got paywalled by going too much back and forth on the page, so can't check it anymore)

Does anyone get which study they're basing the piece on ?

oh boy here we go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com