“Inflammatory Dietary Pattern” Allegedly Linked to Risk of Depression

A recent study has reportedly concluded that an “inflammatory dietary pattern” (IDP) is linked to higher depression risk, raising questions about whether chronic inflammation “may underlie the association between diet and depression.” Michael Lucas, et al., “Inflammatory dietary pattern and risk of depression among women,” Brain, Behavior and Immunity, October 2013.

Defined as a dietary pattern that is positively associated with all inflammatory biomarkers, IDP for the purposes of the study represented a diet “relatively high in sugar-sweetened soft drinks, refined grains, red meat, diet soft drinks, margarine, other vegetables, and fish but low in wine, coffee, olive oil, green leafy and yellow vegetables.” Using food questionnaire data from 43,685 women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study over a 12-year follow-up period, Harvard School of Public Health researchers reported a dose-response relationship between IDP score and depression risk for both stricter and broader definitions of depression.

“In this large prospective cohort of middle-age and older women free from depression or severe depressive symptoms at baseline, we used an empirical statistical method to derive a diet pattern score that was associated with markers of inflammation, and observed that depression risk increases with increasing score of this IDP,” explain the study’s co-authors. “These observations suggest that the association between dietary factors and depression may be mediated in part by inflammation.”