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Obesity, assessed by body-mass index (BMI), has been shown to lead to depression, but not the reverse, in studies using Mendelian randomization (a method that uses genome-wide association data to investigate how much risk factors might cause outcomes). Because BMI does not differentiate between fat and lean body mass, researchers in another Mendelian randomization study have now ascertained whether fat per se is causally associated with depression.
The investigators examined anthropometric data (height, weight, whole-body fat mass, and whole-body nonfat mass) from the UK Biobank (approximately 330,000 individuals) and from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (about 480,000 individuals; about 135,000 cases had major depression, liberally defi…