More research into young males' depression seems promising

Warning sign for depression in teen boys found By Kounteya Sinha, TNN The Times of India, February 19, 2014
LONDON: The world's first biological marker to single out teenagers suffering from acute depression has been found - a discovery scientists hope will enable better diagnosis and treatment. Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been found to be 14 times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait. This has helped scientists from the University of Cambridge identify the first biomarker - a biological signpost - for major, or clinical, depression. They argue this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk of developing the illness and provide treatment at an earlier stage.

Until now there have been no biomarkers for major depression. ; this is believed to be, in part, because both the causes and the symptoms can be so varied.

The researchers now hope that having an easily measurable biomarker - in this case, elevated cortisol plus depressive symptoms - will enable primary care services to identify boys at high risk and consider new public mental health strategies for them in the community. Cambridge University professor Ian Goodyer, who led the study, said depression is a terrible illness that will affect as many as 10 million people in the UK at some point in their lives. "Through our research, we now have a very real way of identifying those teenage boys most likely to develop clinical depression," said Goodyer. "This will help us strategically target preventions and interventions at these individuals and hopefully help reduce their risk of serious episodes of depression and their consequences in adult life."The researchers measured levels of cortisol in saliva from two separate large cohorts of teenagers. The first cohort consisted of 660 teens, who provided four early-morning samples on schooldays within a week and then again twelve months later. The researchers were able to show within this cohort that cortisol levels were stable over one year in the population at large in both boys and girls in this group.

A second cohort, consisting of 1,198 teenagers, provided early-morning samples over three school days. Using self-reports about depression current symptoms collected longitudinally over the 12 months and combining these with the cortisol findings, the researchers were able to divide the teens in the first cohort into four distinct sub-groups, ranging from those with normal levels of morning cortisol and low symptoms of depression over time (Group 1) through to those teenagers with elevated levels of morning cortisol and high symptoms of depression over time (Group 4) - this latter group made up one in six (17%) of all subjects.

The subjects in Group 4 were on average seven times more likely than those in Group 1, and two to three times more likely than in the other two groups, to develop clinical depression.