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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Aging Psychiatry
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1516341
This article is part of the Research Topic Healthy ageing, social psychiatry of older adults and family caregivers View all 3 articles

Association between depressive status and mild cognitive impairment in middle-aged and elderly Chinese adults from CHARLS study

Provisionally accepted
Caijuan Wei Caijuan Wei 1*Jinyu Zhao Jinyu Zhao 2*Rui Hu Rui Hu 2*Xingli Wei Xingli Wei 1*
  • 1 First Hospital of Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China
  • 2 Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Background The potential association between depressive status and the risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains unclear. This study aims to elucidate the impact of either depression score or depression on the risk of MCI using longitudinal data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). Methods This prospective study included 5,766 participants from CHARLS followed from 2011 to 2015. We calculated the baseline depression score using the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CESD-10) and the cognitive status score after 3 years of follow-up through four dimensions: orientation, memory, calculation, and drawing. We collected baseline sociological characteristics and health-related factors as covariates, using multivariate-adjusted logistics regression models (odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI)) and restricted cubic splines (RCS) to estimate the effect of depressive status on MCI risk. Results We observed 724 new cases of MCI at follow-up. Logistics regression analysis showed that participants with depression had a 58% higher risk of developing MCI than those without depression (OR = 1.58, 95%CI: 1.35-1.85), and the positive association persisted after adjusting for covariates such as sociological characteristics of the population and health-related factors (OR = 1.24, 95%CI: 1.04-1.48). We also observed a dose-response relationship between depression score and MCI risk, with participants with 11~20 and 21~30 scores having a progressively higher risk of MCI compared to participants with depression score of 0~10 (p for trend < 0.05), and a 3% increase in MCI risk for each 1-point increase in depression scores (OR = 1.03, 95%CI: 1.01-1.04). RCS analysis also showed a nonlinear association between depression score and MCI risk (p for non-linearity = 0.001), with MCI risk increasing with increasing depression score. In addition, stratified analyses based on sex, age, marital status, residence, BMI, nighttime sleep, smoking status, alcohol drinking status, baseline serological indicators, and comorbidities showed no interaction (p for interaction > 0.05) other than serum total cholesterol levels (p for interaction = 0.008). Conclusions Among middle-aged and elderly adults from CHARLS, depression is an independent risk factor for MCI, indicating that individuals with more severe depression symptoms are more likely to suffer from MCI.

    Keywords: CHARLS, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Depression, depressive status, Restricted cubic spline

    Received: 24 Oct 2024; Accepted: 02 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Wei, Zhao, Hu and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Caijuan Wei, First Hospital of Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China
    Jinyu Zhao, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
    Rui Hu, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
    Xingli Wei, First Hospital of Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China

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