Young adults with depression or overall poor mental health report more heart attacks, strokes and risk factors for cardiovascular disease than their peers without mental health issues, new research shows. The findings, published recently in the Journal of the American Heart Association, add to a large body of evidence linking cardiovascular disease risk and death with depression, but leave unanswered questions about how one may lead to the other. The new research found that young adults who reported having depression had more than double the odds of cardiovascular disease compared to those without depression, the new research showed. For people without established cardiovascular disease, those who reported depression had 1.8 times higher odds of suboptimal cardiovascular health than those without depression. Likewise, the greater the number of poor mental health days they reported, the more likely they were to have cardiovascular disease. Compared to people who reported no poor mental health days in the past month, those who reported up to 13 poor mental health days had 1.5 times higher odds of cardiovascular disease, while participants with two weeks to a full month of poor mental health days had double the odds. For the full report, head to www.heart.org.