4 Troubled Teens Blog

A new study from The Netherlands found an association between depression and obesity: depression increases a person's risk for obesity, and obesity increases a person's risk for depression.

Dr. Floriana Luppino of the Leiden University Medical Center and her colleagues went through 15 previous studies involving 58,745 participants that examined the relationship between depression and obesity or being overweight.

"We found bi-directional associations between depression and obesity," Dr. Luppino said. "Obese persons had a 55 percent increase of developing depression over time. Depressed persons had a 58 person increased risk of becoming obese. The association between depression and obesity was stronger than the association between depression and overweight."

The association was also stronger among Americans than Europeans, and stronger for people who have been diagnosed with depression compared to those with depressive symptoms. Dr. Luppino said she believes that weight gain may be a late consequence of depression, so medical professionals should monitor depressive patients for weight gain, and obese patients for symptoms of depression.

This study appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Labels: depression, obesity

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A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that teenagers who take antipsychotic medications are at risk of becoming overweight or obese, and for developing metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome includes symptoms such as overweight, too much abdominal fat, and abnormal cholesterol and high blood pressure. Some of the teenagers who took these medications developed symptoms of cardiovascular disease.

• Dr. Christoph Correll of Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York and his colleagues studied 272 patients ages 4 to 19 years old who were taking drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Risperdal.
• Between 10 and 36 percent of the studied teens became overweight or obese.
  
• Dr. Correll recommended that "the cardiometabolic risk of these drugs in children should be balanced through careful assessment of the indication for their use, consideration of lower risk alternative, and proactive adverse effect monitoring and management."

"Cardiometabolic adverse effects, such as age-inappropriate weight gain, obesity, hypertension, and lipid and glucose abnormalities are particularly problematic during development," said Dr. Correll, "because they predict adult obesity, the metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular morbidity, and malignancy."

Labels: obesity, antipsychotic, medications

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Teens who suffer from depression are more likely than non-depressed teens to experience depression during adulthood -- which can also put them at risk for a number of other conditions, including obesity.

Adults who have depression or anxiety are one third more likely to become obese, according to a new study in the British Medical Journal.

Researchers studied 4,363 British civil servants ages 35 to 55 years old over a nine-year period. Those who had common mental health disorders were at the greatest risk for weight gain and obesity, even when other factors were excluded.

Labels: depression, obesity

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