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Depressive symptoms and obesity: instrumental variable analysis using mother-offspring pairs in the 1970 British Cohort Study

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-08-03, 12:26 authored by Mark Hamer, G. David Batty, Mika Kivimaki
Background: The extent to which depression and obesity are causally related remains to be determined. We used intergenerational data on mother–offspring pairs in an instrumental variable analysis to examine the longitudinal association between adolescent depressive symptoms and body mass index (BMI) in adulthood. Methods: A total of 4733 mother–offspring pairs were identified from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Mothers completed the Malaise Inventory to assess depressive symptoms on three occasions across their offsprings' childhood/adolescence (aged 5, 10 and 16 years). Height and weight were recorded in mother and offspring (aged 16 years). Measures of height, weight and the Malaise Inventory were repeated in the participant at the age of 42 years. Results: Maternal malaise score was associated with offspring malaise score, thus confirming the validity of the chosen instrumental variable. A higher mother’s malaise score was associated with higher offspring BMI at follow-up (B=0.043; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.013, 0.072). There was a higher risk of adulthood offspring obesity in mothers with two or three episodes of depression compared with one or none (odds ratio, 1.42; 95% CI: 1.14, 1.76). The maternal malaise–offspring BMI association remained (P=0.003) after adjustment for offspring malaise score, suggesting that maternal mental health influences offspring obesity through mechanisms other than depression. Results from standard and instrumental variable analyses did not support a causal pathway in a direction from BMI to depression. Conclusions: Our data support a causal pathway linking adolescent depressive symptoms to adiposity in adulthood over 26 years follow-up. The reverse direction, that is, adiposity to depression, was not supported.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

International Journal of Obesity

Volume

40

Issue

11

Pages

1789-1793

Citation

HAMER, M., BATTY, G.D. and KIVIMAKI, M., 2016. Depressive symptoms and obesity: instrumental variable analysis using mother-offspring pairs in the 1970 British Cohort Study. International Journal of Obesity, 40 (11), pp. 1789-1793.

Publisher

© Nature Publishing Group

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-07-22

Publication date

2016-08-16

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Journal of Obesity and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1038/ijo.2016.143.

ISSN

1476-5497

Language

  • en

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