Despite a high response to the survey (range 66% to 88%) at the successive data collection phases, loss to follow-up accumulated over the extended follow-up, as is inevitable in long-term prospective studies. However, differences between the included and excluded participants were generally small. Our study is based on an occupational cohort, which, by its very nature, is healthier than the general population, so the range of vascular risk scores and the range of depressive symptom measurements are likely to be narrower. This being the case, the associations between the Framingham risk scores and depressive symptoms reported here could underestimate the strength of associations in the general population, although similar associations between manifest vascular disease and depressive symptoms in the present dataset and those from the general population suggest that our estimates are likely to be fairly accurate. Due to the relatively low numbers of depressive symptom cases in the present data, we cannot detect weak associations between vascular risk scores and later-life depressive symptoms.
survey
response
range 66% to 88%
%