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Review of the Recent Literature

Eryn T. Liem, MD; Pieter J. J. Sauer, MD, PhD; Albertine J. Oldehinkel, PhD, MSc; Ronald P. Stolk, MD, PhD

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2008;162(10):981-988.

Objective  To present an overview of the association between depressive symptoms in childhood and adolescence and subsequent overweight in later life.

Data Sources  MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Web of Science for all indexed journals from January 1, 1997, to May 30, 2007.

Study Selection  Abstracts of 513 articles were reviewed manually. Studies were excluded if unrelated to depressive symptoms and overweight (n = 460), if they were conducted in an adult population (n = 10) or in a population of all age groups (n = 2), or if they were performed in clinic-based populations of overweight participants. In total, 32 articles were reviewed including 21 cross-sectional and 11 longitudinal reports.

Main Exposure  Depressive symptoms in childhood and adolescence.

Main Outcome Measure  Overweight.

Results  Four cross-sectional studies that satisfied our quality criteria revealed an association between depressive symptoms and overweight in girls aged 8 to 15 years, reporting different effect sizes including a correlation coefficient of 0.14 and a regression coefficient of 0.27. Four longitudinal studies in accord with our quality criteria suggest that depressive symptoms in childhood or adolescence are associated with a 1.90- to 3.50-fold increased risk of subsequent overweight (95% confidence intervals varying from 1.02 to 5.80, respectively).

Conclusion  These results support a positive association between depressive symptoms at age 6 to 19 years and overweight in later life, assessed after a period of 1 to 15 years.

Author Affiliations: Departments of Pediatrics (Drs Liem and Sauer), Psychiatry (Dr Oldehinkel), and Epidemiology (Drs Liem and Stolk), and Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (Dr Oldehinkel), University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen; and Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Erasmus Medical Center, Sophia Children's Hospital, Rotterdam (Dr Oldehinkel), the Netherlands.

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