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The development of an environmental risk score using Swedish National Registers and its impact on subsequent episodes of major depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2025

Kenneth S. Kendler*
Affiliation:
Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA
Sara L. Lönn
Affiliation:
Center for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden
Jan Sundquist
Affiliation:
Center for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden University Clinic Primary Care Skåne, Region Skåne, Sweden
Kristina Sundquist
Affiliation:
Center for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden University Clinic Primary Care Skåne, Region Skåne, Sweden
*
Corresponding author: Kenneth S. Kendler; Email: Kenneth.Kendler@vcuhealth.org
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Abstract

Background

Stressful life events (SLEs) increase the risk for subsequent major depression (MD) episodes. Most prior studies of SLEs utilized questionnaires or interview-based assessments. We sought to develop and evaluate an environmental risk score (ERS) for MD from multiple classes of SLEs obtained from national Swedish registries.

Methods

We assessed, in the entire adult population of Sweden (n = 7,105,712), the occurrence of 52 categories of SLEs derived from registry information for the 6 months prior to January 9, 2010 and the risk for MD registration over the subsequent 6 months. Weights for our ERS were obtained from a random half of our sample and ERS and its relationship to MD risk was evaluated in the second half.

Results

The ERS was robustly related to risk for subsequent MD episodes. Women were more sensitive to the depressogenic effect of the ERS than men. Those with prior episodes of MD had larger absolute increases in MD risk from our ERS than those without previous episodes. Genetic risk for MD was associated with a greater sensitivity to the depressogenic effects of the ERS. A co-sibling control analysis suggested that most, but not all, of the association between ERS and subsequent risk for MD was causal.

Conclusions

Valid measures of SLEs that predispose to risk for MD can be assessed from high-quality registry data. While not all event categories (e.g. interpersonal or romantic difficulties) can be assessed, this method avoids problems with accurate dating and recall bias and can be performed in very large samples.

Information

Type
Original Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Descriptive statistics for the relationship, in our population cohort, between any stressful life events in the 6 months prior to September 1, 2010 and episodes of major depression in the 6 months after*

Figure 1

Figure 1. The individual stressful life events contributing to our environmental risk score. See Supplementary Table 2 for the ICD codes corresponding to these individual events. The X-axis represents the contribution of the individual stressful event to the ERS (±95% CIs).

Figure 2

Figure 2. The risk for major depression as a function of the environmental risk score (ERS) within 6 months of the exposure window. The points are observed findings to which we fit both a linear and a linear + quadratic model. The Y-axis is the probability of MD and the X-axis is the aggregate ERS score.

Figure 3

Table 2. Results of analyses of the prediction of major depression by the environmental risk score (ERS) and Sex, ERS and Prior MD and ERS and genetic risk for MDa

Figure 4

Figure 3. The risk for major depression as a function of the environmental risk score (ERS) within 6 months of the exposure window in men and women. The Y-axis is the probability of MD and the X-axis is the aggregate ERS score.

Figure 5

Figure 4. The risk for major depression as a function of the environmental risk score (ERS) within 6 months of the exposure window in the presence or absence of a prior episode of major depression. The Y-axis is the probability of MD and the X-axis is the aggregate ERS score.

Figure 6

Figure 5. The risk for major depression as a function of the environmental risk score (ERS) within 6 months of the exposure window as a function of the level of genetic risk for major depression as assessed by the level of the FGRSMD depicted at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile. The Y-axis is the probability of MD and the X-axis is the aggregate ERS score.

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