ArticleMolecular psychiatry2020
Appetite changes reveal depression subgroups with distinct endocrine, metabolic, and immune states.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 85 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 181 citations in OpenAlex.
- Comparative gastrointestinal effects of antidepressants for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a network and dose‒response meta-analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- "The wrong tools for the right job": a critical meta-analysis of traditional tests to assess behavioural impacts of maternal separation.Psychopharmacology · 2023Pooled it
- Peripheral Inflammatory Markers in Subtypes and Core Features of Depression: A Systematized Review.Psychopathology · 2023Pooled it
- Inflammation and depression in young people: a systematic review and proposed inflammatory pathways.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- Glucocorticoid Resistance: Is It a Requisite for Increased Cytokine Production in Depression? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2019Pooled it
- Differential associations of somatic and cognitive-affective symptoms of depression with inflammation and insulin resistance: cross-sectional and longitudinal results from the Emotional Distress Sub-Study of the GRADE study.Diabetologia · 2025 · on this mapTrial
- Impact of ibuprofen and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma on emotion-related neural activation: A randomized, placebo-controlled trial.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2021Trial
- Investigating functional connectivity differences during food vs. monetary reward processing across appetitive phenotypes of major depressive disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Article
- Genetic clusters of BMI reveal symptom-specific causal effects on depression.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- EEG Signatures of Melancholia: An Update.NeuroSci · 2026Review
- Blunted anticipation, but not consummation, of food rewards in depression.Cell reports. Medicine · 2026Article
- Symptom-specific genetics reveal heterogeneity within major depressive disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Metabolism and the Mind: Investigating the Link Between Glucose Control and Reinforcement Learning in Humans.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Obesity and Depression.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Individualized perioperative nutritional management in orthognathic surgery: an evidence-graded, integrated framework linking upper-airway change, feeding function, and psychological status.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Review
- Associations between appetite loss and psychopathology as well as gender differences in adolescents with major depressive disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- The moderating role of diet and physical activity in insulin resistance and immunometabolic depression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Association between body roundness index and trajectories of depressive symptoms among Chinese middle-aged and older adults: a nationwide cohort study from CHARLS.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health.Science advances · 2025Review
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
There exists little human neuroscience research to explain why some individuals lose their appetite when they become depressed, while others eat more. Answering this question may reveal much about the various pathophysiologies underlying depression. The present study combined neuroimaging, salivary cortisol, and blood markers of inflammation and metabolism collected prior to scanning. We compared the relationships between peripheral endocrine, metabolic, and immune signaling and brain activity to food cues between depressed participants experiencing increased (N = 23) or decreased (N = 31) appetite and weight in their current depressive episode and healthy control participants (N = 42). The two depression subgroups were unmedicated and did not differ in depression severity, anxiety, anhedonia, or body mass index. Depressed participants experiencing decreased appetite had higher cortisol levels than subjects in the other two groups, and their cortisol values correlated inversely with the ventral striatal response to food cues. In contrast, depressed participants experiencing increased appetite exhibited marked immunometabolic dysregulation, with higher insulin, insulin resistance, leptin, CRP, IL-1RA, and IL-6, and lower ghrelin than subjects in other groups, and the magnitude of their insulin resistance correlated positively with the insula response to food cues. These findings provide novel evidence linking aberrations in homeostatic signaling pathways within depression subtypes to the activity of neural systems that respond to food cues and select when, what, and how much to eat. In conjunction with prior work, the present findings strongly support the existence of pathophysiologically distinct depression subtypes for which the direction of appetite change may be an easily measured behavioral marker.
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