Family History, Life Events and the Factorial Structure of Depression in a Nigerian Sample of Inpatients

Abstract

The aims of the study were to examine the frequency of a family history of depression among 96 patients with subtypes of ICD-10 depression, their life event scores, and compare the factors of depression with other studies. Subjects were assessed using the PSE-9, 23-item HDRS, BPRS and life event schedule. Family history was significantly commoner for psychotic depression. There were no significant differences in life event scores. The HDRS factors – core depression, endogenous, insomnia and psychic anxiety – were similar to those of previous studies. Combining the HDRS and BPRS yielded factors that were more representative of the dimensions of depression. While family history distinguishes psychotic depression, life events are important with increasing age, but require interaction with predisposing factors. Although depression is heterogeneous, there are core clinical features which are stable across cultures and time. Family history is more associated with the severer forms of the disorder, and combining relevant questionnaires maybe more useful in research on symptom profiles.

Induction of mania in depression by paroxetine

“…It has been reported that a positive history of family psychiatric illness was associated with a poor prognosis (Duggan et al, 1998;Ohaeri and Otote, 2002). The result in this study supposed that a positive history of family psychiatric illness would be a risk factor for poor prognosis in paroxetine treatment.…”

Data-driven subtypes of major depressive disorder: a systematic review

“…The most consistent finding was that the 2 core symptoms of depression (sadness and loss of interest; s1 and s2), loaded on one single factor in 11 out of 13 analyses [37-41,43-45]. In 9 of these 11 analyses, s1 and s2 loaded on factor 1, which was the factor explaining most of the variance.…”

“…In 7 out of 8 analyses, at least one factor was identified that explained the variance of 2 of the 4 somatic symptoms [39-41,44,45], and the total number of factors with 2 somatic symptoms was 10, describing the variance of 6 different pairs of somatic symptoms. Of those 10 factors with 2 somatic symptoms, 5 also incorporated one or more cognitive symptoms [37,39,40,44,45]. …”

“…Several studies analyzed the same questionnaires with different patient samples: three studies used the HRSD [37,40,41], two studies the BDI [41,42] and three studies the MADRS [38,43,44]. The analyses of the same questionnaires resulted in substantial different factors, both qualitatively (item content) and quantitatively (number of factors).…”

“…Four studies performed latent factor analyses on a combination of items from different questionnaires [36,37,41,54]. Although response categories vary between different questionnaires, no study used a smoothing method to adjust for these variances, which could explain part of the following results.…”