We thank all participants of the @nako.de and the many researchers and staff involved.
Special thanks to Aina Kresken and Maja Völker, who led the analyses as part of their Master’s and PhD work 👏

These findings are based on cross-sectional data, and childhood maltreatment was reported retrospectively, which may introduce recall or reporting bias.
Causal interpretations should therefore be made with caution.

Mediation analyses including all five childhood maltreatment subtypes jointly, showed that childhood maltreatment mediated ~19% of the sex difference in lifetime depression and ~30% of the sex difference in current depression, mainly due to sex differences in exposure.

We estimated population attributable fractions (PAFs) to quantify the contribution.
Overall, maltreatment accounted for 26% of lifetime depression and 33% of current depression, with consistently higher contributions in females.
Emotional abuse and emotional neglect showed the largest contributions.

For lifetime depression (physician’s diagnosis), physical abuse and physical neglect showed stronger associations in females, whereas sexual abuse showed a stronger association in males. All maltreatment subtypes were associated with substantially increased odds of depression in both sexes.

We examined five types of childhood maltreatment.
Females reported higher prevalence of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and emotional neglect, with the strongest sex difference for sexual abuse (~9.5% vs 2.5%). Physical abuse was slightly more common in males (~8.3% vs 7.7%).

We analyzed data from 159,045 participants aged 19–72 years from the German National Cohort.
Both lifetime depression (physician’s diagnosis) and current depression (PHQ-9 ≥ 10) were more common in females than in males
(17.7% vs 10.1% and 9.0% vs 5.9%, respectively).

I want to thank all researchers involved, including Maja Völker, Carolin Callies, and Stephanie Witt, and all the staff and participants of @nako.de. Looking forward to extend this investigation to the longditudinal data available now, and to other data domains including MRI and genetics!

We observed a clear dose-response relationship: higher daily cigarette consumption correlates with more severe depressive symptoms, while the risk decreases the longer an individual has remained abstinent.

Our analysis reveals that both lifetime and current depression are lowest in never-smokers, highest in current smokers, and intermediate in former smokers.

An updated preprint of our Borderline Personality Disorder GWAS is now online:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...