Paans NPG, et al. - The association between depressive disorder, severity, course and specific depressive symptom profiles and unhealthy eating styles were investigated in this study. Intervention programs for depression ought to examine whether treating disordered eating especially in those with neuro-vegetative, atypical depressive symptoms could help in preventing or minimising adverse health consequences.

Methods

• The researchers used cross-sectional and course data from 1,060 remitted depressed patients, 309 currently depressed patients and 381 healthy controls from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety.

Results

• Using analyses of covariance and linear regression, depressive disorders (DSM-IV based psychiatric interview) and self-reported depressive symptoms (Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology) were associated with emotional, external and restrained eating (Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire).
• The researchers found significant association of remitted and current depressive disorders with higher emotional eating (Cohen's d = 0.40 and 0.60 respectively, p < 0.001) and higher external eating (Cohen's d = 0.20, p=0.001 and Cohen's d = 0.32, p < 0.001 respectively).
• They observed little differences in eating styles between depression course groups.
• In this study, associations followed a dose-response association, with more emotional and external eating when depression was more severe (both p-values <0.001).
• Furthermore, longer symptom duration was correlated with more emotional and external eating (p < 0.001 and p=0.001 respectively).
• Neuro-vegetative depressive symptoms contributed relatively more to emotional and external eating, while mood and anxious symptoms contributed relatively less to emotional and external eating, when examining individual depressive symptoms.
• They found no depression associations with restrained eating.