Healthcare burden of depression in adults with arthritis

Introduction: Arthritis and depression are two of the top disabling conditions. When arthritis and depression exist in the same individual, they can interact with each other negatively and pose a significant healthcare burden on the patients, their families, payers, healthcare systems, and society as a whole. Areas covered: The primary objective of this review is to summarize, identify knowledge gaps and discuss the challenges in estimating the healthcare burden of depression among individuals with arthritis. Electronic literature searches were performed on PubMed, Embase, EBSCOhost, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar to identify relevant studies. Expert Commentary: Our review revealed that the prevalence of depression varied depending on the definition of depression, type of arthritis, tools and threshold points used to identify depression, and the country of residence. Depression exacerbated arthritis-related complications as well as pain and was associated with poor health-related quality of life, disability, mortality, and high financial burden. There were significant knowledge gaps in estimates of incident depression rates, depression attributable disability, and healthcare utilization, direct and indirect healthcare costs among individuals with arthritis.