Editorial Depression in Patients with End-Stage Renal Disease Treated with Dialysis: Has the Time to Treat Arrived?

T he World Health Organization has highlighted depres-sion as the second most common and economicallycostly chronic disease that will affect nonmedically ill people globally over the next decades (1). Depression in pa-tients with another medical or psychiatric illness, or “com-pound depression, ” is typically of greater intensity and more difficult to treat than depression occurring in patients without other underlying disorders (2–6). Depression has been identi-fied as the most common psychiatric illness in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), but its prevalence has varied widely in different studies, in different populations, using dif-ferent assessment tools (2,3,7). Among the difficulties in eval-uating the data has been the wide variety of assessment tools used to quantify depressive affect and for establishing the diagnosis of depression in patients with and without medical illness. Depression is characterized by both cognitive and somati