![]() ![]() ![]() Maternal antenatal and postnatal depression.The authors controlled for a range of covariates, again drawing on the ALSPAC dataset, related to child characteristics, parent characteristics, and family socioeconomic status (SES) that could, according to the literature, potentially confound or interfere with the relationship between timing of menarche and depression. The adolescents in ALSPAC also completed the Clinical Interview Schedule-Revised (CIS-R) at age 18 to assess for the presence of a diagnosis of depression, according to ICD-10 criteria (Patton et al., 1999).The adolescents in ALSPAC completed the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ), a widely used, standardised self-report measure (Turner et al., 2014) at age 14, 17, and 19.The authors derived data on the adolescents’ levels of depression from the following sources: Adolescents themselves completed a questionnaire at 12 years 10 months and 13 years 10 months, which asked whether they had begun menstruation yet and at what age.Parents in ALSPAC completed a pubertal development questionnaire approximately annually from their child’s 8 th birthday (until their 17 th birthday). ![]() The authors derived data on age at menarche from the following sources: Mendelian randomisation is a technique for assessing causal associations in observational data. The ALSPAC dataset includes data on age at menarche for 3,579 adolescent girls, and genetic data for 3,006 adolescent girls (all of White ethnicity), which formed the starting sample for the present study. Pregnant women living in the Avon area of England were recruited to take part in ALSPAC when their expected delivery date was between the 1 st April 1991 and the 31 st December 1992. The authors drew on data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (Golding et al, 2001 Fraser et al, 2013) for their analyses. the naturally occurring genetic variation in timing of menarche, which simulates the randomisation of participants in a RCT. ![]() Mendelian randomisation analysis uses a natural source of randomisation, i.e. To address this issue, the authors used Mendelian randomisation analysis as a proxy for an RCT design to explore the potential cause and effect relationship between early menarche and depression in adolescents. However, an RCT would not be appropriate for use in the present study because participants cannot be randomly allocated to different conditions related to timing of menarche, as this is not something that can be experimentally manipulated. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs), in which participants are randomly allocated to receive or take part in different treatment groups, are a rigorous method for examining possible cause and effect relationships between variables (Sibbald & Roland, 1998). The menarche is when young women first experience menstrual bleeding. However, it is unclear whether this effect persists into late adolescence and adulthood, and whether this relationship is causal.Ĭonsequently, new research recently published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, led by Maija-Eliina Sequeira (2016), has used Mendelian randomisation analysis to examine the possible causal association between early onset of menarche and depressive symptoms and diagnosed depression in girls during adolescence, and whether this association is still apparent in late adolescence. Joinson et al., 2013 Opoliner et al., 2014). Associations between early menarche (the onset of first menstrual bleeding) and elevated rates of depressive symptoms and clinical depression in girls have been widely reported in the literature (e.g. Researchers have looked to the role of pubertal processes in an effort to explain this sex difference (Hamilton et al., 2014). A large body of evidence indicates that girls are twice as likely as boys to experience depression during adolescence a finding that is robust across clinical and epidemiological samples of young people, and across different types of assessment (Thapar et al., 2011). ![]()
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