Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have discovered a set of variables from more than 100 fields that may represent important goals for the prevention of depression in adults. In a study published in the American Journal of Psychology, the team cited social relations as the strongest cause of depression, and suggested that reducing sedentary activities such as watching TV and sleeping during the day could also help reduce the risk of depression.
"Depression is the leading cause of disability in the world, but so far researchers have focused only on risk and risk factors, often in one or two domains," says Karmel Choi, PhD, investigator in the Department of Psychiatry and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health , and the lead author of the paper. "Our study provides a more complete picture so far of changeable factors that may affect the risk of depression."
To that end, the researchers took two steps. The first step provided the database of more than 100,000 participants in the UK Biobank - a popular adult group study - to systematically analyze a variety of variables that may be associated with risk of depression, as well as social interactions, media use, systems sleep, nutrition, exercise, and environmental impact. This method, known as the broader corporate search (ExWAS), is similar to the genome cooperative studies (GWAS) that have been widely used to identify genetic risk factors for disease. The second step took the most flexible candidates from ExWAS and used a technique called Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate which factors may be related to the risk factor for depression. MR is a statistical method that addresses genetic differences between individuals as a form of natural experiment to determine if a party can show cause rather than just correlation.
On the other hand, the factors associated with the risk of depression include the amount of time spent watching TV, although authors feel that additional research is needed to determine whether the risk was due to individual media exposure or if time in front of the TV was a sedentary agent. . Perhaps most surprisingly, daytime sleep patterns and regular use of many nutrients appeared to be associated with an increased risk of depression, although further research is needed to determine how these may contribute.
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