Association Between Body Mass Index and Depression in Adolescent Women

Overweight and obesity are persistently increasing worldwide, mainly in adolescents. Both are related to serious chronic diseases and depression, especially in women. We studied 180 adolescent women from the city of Quito, Ecuador. After obtaining informed consent, the women were sampled by two-stage clusters, body mass index (BMI) was measured and Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI 1-A) was performed. The data were entered in Excel 2011 and processed in SPSS v22, to determine the association between BMI and depression. The internal validation of the BDI was calculated and Cronbach's alpha values of 0.818 were obtained. For the response variable, one-way ANOVA test was used, with an alpha error < 0.05; the Games-Howell post-hoc test was used to differentiate the means; descriptive data of position and dispersion of the variables were obtained. We identified 27.22 % of the individuals with overweight and obesity, and 25.56 % with depression issues, being more frequent in 19-year-old women. There was a difference between the means of depression of the normal weight group vs. overweight and obesity (p < 0.05); the post-hoc test of Games-Howell differentiated normal weight-overweight (p < 0.05). The relative risk was 8.55. These results are similar, both in overweight and obesity variables, and in depression, to those reported in other studies. A statistically significant association was observed between the study variables (overweight-obesity and depression), in adolescent women from the city of Quito, Ecuador.