Prenatal exposure to the German food crisis 1944-1948 and health after 65 years

Early-life undernutrition and depression later in life: a systematic review

CONTEXT

Early adverse experience can have a long-term effect on growth and development and negative repercussions into adulthood. Among the various consequences of undernutrition is depression.

OBJECTIVE

The present work aimed to evaluate the relationship between early-life undernutrition and depression in adult life.

DATA SOURCES

Data were obtained from the PubMed, SCOPUS, and Web of Science databases in November 2021 and were selected using the systematic bibliographic review manager program State of the Art Through Systematic Review.

DATA EXTRACTION

Data were extracted using the State of the Art Through Systematic Review program.

DATA ANALYSIS

Of the 559 articles that were identified, 114 were duplicates, and 426 were excluded after inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to the title and abstract. One other relevant study was included. From the 20 remaining articles, 8 were excluded after the full-text screening. Finally, 12 articles remained for review in the present work. The studies described in these articles investigated humans, rats, or mice, and correlated early-life malnutrition and depression in adulthood as the principal outcome.

CONCLUSIONS

Undernutrition in early life and later depression are linked. Furthermore, the knowledge that the risk factors for depression start at the beginning of life points to public health policies starting in intrauterine life and extending throughout childhood and adolescence.

A Link between Prenatal Stage of Life during the Great Chinese Famine and Subsequent Depressive Symptoms among Middle-Aged and Older Adults

Prenatal malnutrition may increase the risk of depressive symptoms in adulthood. This study investigated the association between prenatal exposure to malnutrition with risk of depressive symptoms in middle-aged and older adults using the Chinese Great Famine of 1959-1961 as a natural experiment. Data were obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study baseline survey (2011). A total of 5391 individuals born from 1956 to 1965 were included in the study. Depressive symptoms were ascertained via the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale short form. Famine severity was measured using the cohort size shrinkage index. Difference-in-differences models were used to explore the association between prenatal famine exposure and later-life depressive symptoms. Compared with the post-famine cohort (1963-1965), famine cohorts (1959-1962) were 4.74 times (95% CI = 1.28-8.20) as likely to develop depressive symptoms. The stratified analysis found that prenatal exposure to famine was associated with depressive symptoms in rural residents but not those living in urban areas. In rural females, prenatal malnutrition was associated with a higher risk of depressive symptoms. However, there was no significant association between prenatal malnutrition and depressive symptoms in rural males. Our results indicated that prenatal malnutrition may contribute to a higher risk for depressive symptoms in later life among female rural residents.

Are stunted child - overweight mother pairs a real defined entity or a statistical artifact?

In a methodological contribution, Dieffenbach & Stein (DS) (The Journal of Nutrition, 142(4), 771-773.) concluded that the double burden of malnutrition (DBM), represented by stunted child - overweight mother pairs (SCOM), is a statistical artifact, meaning that SCOM does not describe a unique phenomenon because the observed rates of SCOM across a number of countries were not strongly different from the product of observed rates of maternal overweight (OM) and child stunting (SC), which DS referred to as the expected rate of SCOM. However, a growing literature continues to use SCOM as an indicator of the DBM. This study shows that the analysis by DS is not sufficient to conclude that SCOM can be explained by the co-occurrence of OM and SC due to chance alone because the analysis by DS was conducted at the country level, but applied to SCOM, which is a household-level variable. Using Demographic and Health Surveys data from 202 country-year data sets, we do not confirm important implicit assumptions that are required for the claim by DS to be supported. We also outline that comparing the expected to the observed rate of SCOM is primarily informative when putting it in relation to factors that influence the supply and demand of food consumed by households. When considering these factors, we find further evidence that it is misleading to consider SCOM as a statistical artifact, as the difference between the observed and the expected rate of SCOM significantly differs by household wealth. Recognizing that SCOM is a distinct phenomenon is important for policymakers who develop double-duty strategies that address malnutrition, and for researchers who need useful indicators to study the determinants of malnutrition at the household level.