Obesity In Girls Triggered By Stress Hormone, Depression
Filed under: Depression, Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness, Pediatrics / Children's Health, Women's Health / Gynecology
Depression raises stress hormone levels in adolescent boys and girls but may lead to obesity only in girls, according to researchers. Early treatment of depression could help reduce stress and control obesity – a major health issue.
“This is the first time cortisol reactivity has been identified as a mediator between depressed mood and obesity in girls,” said Elizabeth J. Susman, the Jean Phillips Shibley professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. “We really haven’t seen this connection in kids before, but it tells us that there are biological risk factors that are similar for obesity and depression.”
Cortisol, a hormone, regulates various metabolic functions in the body and is released as a reaction to stress. Researchers have long known that depression and cortisol are related to obesity, but they had not figured out the exact biological mechanism.
Although it is not clear why high cortisol reactions translate into obesity only for girls, scientists believe it may be due to physiological and behavioral differences — estrogen release and stress eating in girls — in the way the two genders cope with anxiety. Read more
Chocolate Consumption Linked To Depression, Study
Women and men eat more chocolate as depressive symptoms increase, suggesting an association between mood and chocolate, say researchers at the University of California School of Medicine in San Diego.
Results of this paper, co-authored by Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at UCSD School of Medicine, will appear in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
“Our study confirms long-held suspicions that eating chocolate is something that people do when they are feeling down,” said Dr. Golomb. “Because it was a cross sectional study, meaning a slice in time, it did not tell us whether the chocolate decreased or intensified the depression.”
Golomb and her colleagues examined the relationship of chocolate consumption to mood in an adult study sample of about 1,000 subjects who were not on antidepressant medications and did not have any known cardiovascular disease or diabetes. Participants were asked questions regarding how many servings of chocolate they ate in a week, and were screened using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) to measure mood. Read more