Original articleA Prospective Study of Overeating, Binge Eating, and Depressive Symptoms Among Adolescent and Young Adult Women
Section snippets
Sample
The GUTS is an ongoing prospective cohort study of 9,039 female and 7,843 male offspring of women in the Nurses' Health Study II [15]. GUTS cohort members were aged 9–14 years when the cohort was established in 1996. Consent to invite the children to participate was obtained from their mothers. Return of a completed baseline questionnaire was considered assent by the child. GUTS participants have been mailed questionnaires every 12–24 months since 1996. The questionnaires are revised before
Statistical analysis
To assess the temporal relation between depressive symptoms and overeating and binge eating, two sets of statistical models were run. In initial analyses, overeating and binge eating at baseline, defined as 1999 for the 1999 through 2001 time interval and as 2001 for the 2001 through 2003 time interval, were included as separate predictors in a model predicting incident depressive symptoms at follow-up, defined as 2001 or 2003 for the aforementioned time intervals. In other statistical models,
Results
The demographics of the study population in 1999, 2001, and 2003 are presented in Table 1. In 1999, the mean age of the females was 14.9 (standard deviation: 1.6) years. Between 1999 and 2003, the prevalence of overeating and binge eating more than doubled in this nationwide cohort of adolescent and young adult females: the prevalence of overeating increased from 1.5% to 3.7% and that of binge eating increased from 2.4% to 5.7%. During the same period, the prevalence of overweight increased
Discussion
The results of our study support the existence of two distinct prospective pathways between depressive symptoms and overeating and binge eating: depressive symptoms predict the onset of overeating and binge eating during 2 years of follow-up, and overeating and binge eating predict the development of high-depressive symptoms during 2 years of follow-up. Moreover, the relative strength of both prospective relationships appears similar.
The findings that depressive symptoms at baseline were
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the GUTS team of investigators for their contributions to this article and the thousands of young people across the country participating in the Growing Up Today Study. They also thank Laura Pierce for her technical assistance.
This research was supported by research grants from the National Institutes of Health (DK59570 and MH087786). H.H.S. was supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute (CA098566), and S.B.A. was supported by the Leadership Education in
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