Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany.
Br J Health Psychol. 2013 Nov;18(4):827-43. doi: 10.1111/bjhp.12025. Epub 2013 Jan 25.
Comorbid depression is highly prevalent in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and associated with a worse course of disease; however, the exact mechanisms linking both remain unclear. In currently depressed individuals without lung disease, depression-specific biases in information processing have been suggested as risk factors for the development and maintenance of depression. We examined whether comparable biases in cognitive information processing might underlie depression in COPD.
Different aspects of cognitive information processing were examined with computer-based tasks measuring selective attention and memory in patients with COPD who were compared with age-matched, currently depressed patients without lung disease and healthy control participants.
The Self-Referential Encoding and Incidental Recall Task as well as the emotion face dot-probe task was applied to 21 never-depressed COPD patients, 18 currently depressed COPD patients, 20 currently depressed patients without lung disease and 19 healthy controls to examine cognitive biases.
In both patients with COPD who were never and who were currently depressed, depression-like cognitive biases were observed for some attention- and memory-related tasks, but not for all tested aspects of information processing. These biases were particularly prominent in patients with COPD and current depression and comparable to those observed in currently depressed patients without lung disease.
The results of this pilot study suggest that patients with COPD may potentially show depression-like biases in some aspects of cognitive information processing. Future studies are required to examine whether these biases represent a vulnerability factor for the development of depression in patients with COPD.
合并抑郁在慢性阻塞性肺疾病（COPD）患者中非常普遍，并且与疾病的恶化有关；然而，两者之间的确切联系机制仍不清楚。在目前没有肺部疾病的抑郁患者中，信息处理方面的抑郁特异性偏见被认为是抑郁发生和维持的危险因素。我们研究了在 COPD 中是否存在类似的认知信息处理偏见。
通过计算机化任务来检查 COPD 患者的认知信息处理的不同方面，这些任务可以测量选择性注意和记忆，并将其与年龄匹配的、目前没有肺部疾病的抑郁患者和健康对照组进行比较。
应用自我参照编码和偶然回忆任务以及情绪面孔点探测任务，对 21 名从未抑郁的 COPD 患者、18 名目前患有 COPD 的抑郁患者、20 名目前患有肺部疾病的抑郁患者和 19 名健康对照组进行认知偏见的检测。
在从未抑郁和目前抑郁的 COPD 患者中，对于一些与注意力和记忆相关的任务，观察到了类似抑郁的认知偏见，但并非所有测试的信息处理方面都存在这种偏见。这些偏见在目前患有 COPD 和抑郁的患者中尤为明显，与目前没有肺部疾病的抑郁患者中的偏见相当。
这项初步研究的结果表明，COPD 患者在认知信息处理的某些方面可能表现出类似抑郁的偏见。需要进一步的研究来检验这些偏见是否代表 COPD 患者中抑郁发生的脆弱因素。
