Those who endure melancholy when they’re middle aged or elderly may also have a higher danger of dementia after, a brand new study implies.

Researchers evaluated long-term data from more than 13,000 individuals in California. They found that depressive symptoms occurred in about 14 percent of participants in midlife only, while about 9.2 percent of cases of depression developed in late life just. Just over 4 percent of people of the study had depression that stretched over midlife and late life.

Over six years of follow-up, 22.5 percent of the participants were diagnosed with dementia. The study found that 5.5 percent of the participants developed Alzheimer’s disease and 2.3 percent grown vascular dementia, which is caused by brain damage resulting from diminished blood flow to the brain.

According to the research team, people with late-life depression were twice as more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease and those with both midlife and late-life depression had a more than threefold increased danger of vascular dementia.

Deborah Barnes, of the University of California, San Francisco, along with the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center led the research team. Writing in the May issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, they say the findings suggest that depression extending through the lifespan might raise chances for dementia, particularly vascular dementia. Oftentimes, depression occurring for the first time in late life may represent an early stage of dementia, especially in the case of Alzheimer’s disease.

The research was only able to find an association between depression and Alzheimer’s danger; it couldn’t establish cause and effect.

More than 5 million men and women in America have Alzheimer’s disease as well as the health care costs of the state were about $172 billion in 2010, based on background information in the analysis.

“Prevalence and costs of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias are projected to rise dramatically during the next 40 years unless a prevention or a cure could be found. Thus, it is important to get a better comprehension of the crucial risk factors and etiologic [causal] underpinnings of dementia,” the researchers wrote.