==== Front
Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3266
igaa057.3266
Abstracts
Session 10150 (Late Breaking Poster)
Biobehavioral Health
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
The Age-Dependent Relationship Between Vascular Risk Factors and Trajectories of Depressed Mood
Blöchl Maria 1 Schaare Lina 2 Kunzmann Ute 3 Nestler Steffen 4 1 
University of Münster, Leipzig, Germany
2 
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
3 
University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany
4 
University of Münster, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”884 885
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Cardiovascular risk factors (CVRFs) have been linked to depression, but it is still unclear whether this association becomes stronger or weaker from mid- to later life. Thus, our main aim was to investigate the influence of age on the associations between CRVFs and trajectories of depressed mood. Our sample included 6835 individuals (aged 52–89 years) from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), who were free of manifest vascular disease at baseline and had bi-yearly measurements of depressed mood over ten years. A composite score incorporated the presence of five CVRFs: hypertension, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and hypercholesterolemia. We used second-order latent growth models to examine the effect of CVRFs, age, and their interaction on levels and changes in depressed mood over time. Our results revealed that baseline CVRFs were associated with higher levels of depressed mood. This association decreased with age and was stronger in midlife compared to later life. CVRFs were not related to changes in depressed mood, indicating that these differences remained stable over time. These findings suggest that CVRFs in midlife, but less so in older age, predict stable differences in depressed mood. They are consistent with reports on the importance of CVRFs in midlife and may support the idea that prevention of vascular burden in this age period may be critical to maintain mental health.