ArticleBrain, behavior, and immunity2018
Associations of immunometabolic risk factors with symptoms of depression and anxiety: The role of cardiac vagal activity.
Article in Brain, behavior, and immunity, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- The prevalence and related factors of metabolic syndrome in outpatients with first-episode drug-naive major depression comorbid with anxiety.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Cross-Organ Neuroimmunology of Behavior.Annual review of immunology · 2026Review
- Anxiety is associated with systemic pro-inflammatory profile and plasma lipid changes in Mexican young adults.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Article
- Age Differences in Factors Associated With Insomnia Severity: A Comparative Study of Questionnaire Scores and Heart Rate Variability Parameters.Depression and anxiety · 2026Article
- Discovery of Personalized Treatment for Immuno-Metabolic Depression-Focus on 11beta Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase Type 2 (11betaHSD2) and Toll-like Receptor 4 (TLR4) Inhibition with Enoxolone.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Mediating effect of pro-inflammatory cytokines in the association between depression, anxiety, and cardiometabolic disorders in an ethnically diverse middle-aged and older population.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Hippocampal vascular supply and its mediating role in systemic physiological influences on hippocampal volume.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- A systems identification approach using Bayes factors to deconstruct the brain bases of emotion regulation.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Lipids in Psychiatric Disorders: Functional and Potential Diagnostic Role as Blood Biomarkers.Metabolites · 2024Review
- The personality meta-trait of stability and carotid artery atherosclerosis.Journal of personality · 2023Article
- Article
- A chicken and egg scenario in psychoneuroimmunology: Bidirectional mechanisms linking cytokines and depression.Journal of affective disorders reports · 2021Article
- Alteration of Autonomic Nervous System Is Associated With Severity and Outcomes in Patients With COVID-19.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
- The association of depression and anxiety with cardiac autonomic activity: The role of confounding effects of antidepressants.Depression and anxiety · 2019Article
- Cardiac and behavioral effects of social isolation and experimental manipulation of autonomic balance.Autonomic neuroscience : basic & clinical · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesThis study examined 1) the cross-sectional relationships between symptoms of depression/anxiety and immunometabolic risk factors, and 2) whether these relationships might be explained in part by cardiac vagal activity.
methodsData were drawn from the Adult Health and Behavior registries (n = 1785), comprised of community dwelling adults (52.8% women, aged 30-54). Depressive symptoms were measured with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and anxious symptoms with the Trait Anxiety scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T). Immunometabolic risk factors included fasting levels of triglycerides, high-density lipoproteins, glucose, and insulin, as well as blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass index, C-reactive protein, and interleukin-6. Measures of cardiac autonomic activity were high- and low-frequency indicators of heart rate variability (HRV), standard deviation of normal-to-normal R-R intervals, and the mean of absolute and successive differences in R-R intervals.
resultsHigher BDI-II scores, in contrast to CES-D and STAI-T scores, were associated with increased immunometabolic risk and decreased HRV, especially HRV likely reflecting cardiac vagal activity. Decreased HRV was also associated with increased immunometabolic risk. Structural equation models indicated that BDI-II scores may relate to immunometabolic risk via cardiac vagal activity (indirect effect: β = .012, p = .046) or to vagal activity via immunometabolic risk (indirect effect: β = -.015, p = .021).
conclusionsDepressive symptoms, as measured by the BDI-II, but not anxious symptoms, were related to elevated levels of immunometabolic risk factors and low cardiac vagal activity. The latter may exhibit bidirectional influences on one another in a meditational framework. Future longitudinal, intervention, an nonhuman animal work is needed to elucidate the precise and mechanistic pathways linking depressive symptoms to immune, metabolic, and autonomic parameters of physiology that predispose to cardiovascular disease risk.
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