Comorbidity of unipolar depression in patients of vitiligo attending tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Background: Vitiligo is one of the most common dermatological illnesses with localized depigmentation leading to cosmetic impairment. This also causes impairment of physical, psychological, social functioning of individual which in turn leads to psychiatric morbidities such as anxiety and depression. Aims and Objective: The present hospital based study was carried out to evaluate the presence of depression in patients of vitiligo patients in their different socio demographic variables. In addition, attempts were made to measure the severity of depression in those patients. Material and Methods: This was a hospital based cross-sectional study. Eighty patients of vitiligo with lesions in the exposed body parts were enrolled for the study after their informed consent with purposive sampling method from the Department of Dermatology, in a tertiary care hospital in north eastern part of India and compared them with those of healthy control. Those patients were evaluated by using ICD-10 research criteria and 17 item Hamilton rating scale of depression to diagnose and grade the degree of depression. Data were collected and “Chi Square Test” or “Fisher Exact t Test” was used. Mean value and standard deviation were calculated. All analysis were done using SPSS version 20.0. Results: Co morbidity of depression was significantly higher in vitiligo group (23.75%) in comparison to control group (6.25%). Among the depressed patients 68.43% had mild depression and 31.57% had moderate depression. Depression was inversely proportional to the years of education. Conclusions: These findings indicate the need of early recognition of depression among these patients and their early intervention, which will improve the primary disease process positively.

Keywords

• comorbidity
• depression
• dermatological illness
• vitiligo