ArticlePsychological medicine2024
No relationship between male pubertal timing and depression - new insights from epidemiology and Mendelian randomization.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Puberty in Context: Accounting for Psychosocial Experiences in the Association Between Pubertal Timing, Sex/Gender, and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms in Canadian Youth.Depression and anxiety · 2026Article
- Central Precocious Puberty and Psychiatric Disorders.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- The causal role of male pubertal timing for the development of externalizing and internalizing traits: results from Mendelian randomization studies.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn males, the relationship between pubertal timing and depression is understudied and less consistent than in females, likely for reasons of unmeasured confounding. To clarify this relationship, a combined epidemiological and genetic approach was chosen to exploit the methodological advantages of both approaches.
methodsData from 2026 males from a nationwide, representative study were used to investigate the non-/linear relationship between pubertal timing defined by the age at voice break and depression, considering a multitude of potential confounders and their interactions with pubertal timing. This analysis was complemented by Mendelian randomization (MR), which is robust to inferential problems inherent to epidemiological studies. We used 71 single nucleotide polymorphisms related to pubertal timing in males as instrumental variable to clarify its causal relationship with depression based on data from 807 553 individuals (246 363 cases and 561 190 controls) by univariable and multivariable MR, including BMI as pleiotropic phenotype.
resultsUnivariable MR indicated a causal effect of pubertal timing on depression risk (inverse-variance weighted: OR 0.93, 95%-CI [0.87-0.99)],
conclusionsPubertal timing is not related to MDD risk in males.
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