High Incidence of Depression and Anxiety in Offspring of Depressed and/or Anxious Parents: An Exploration of the Effect of Age and Gender on Individual Symptoms

Abstract

Depression and anxiety disorders are complex disorders transmitted intergenerationally. Age and gender play a role in their transmission among the general population, with adolescent girls presenting an increased likelihood of relevant symptomatology. However, not much is known about the effect of age and gender on offspring population yet. The current study investigated whether age is positively related to the number of depressive/anxiety symptoms (hypothesis 1) and whether the positive association of age with the number of depressive/anxiety symptoms is stronger in girls than in boys (hypothesis 2). To test these hypotheses, a symptom-specific approach of the disorders was adopted and associations with individual symptoms were also explored. Data from the “Adolescents at Risk of Anxiety and Depression: A Neurobiological and Epidemiological approach” (ARIADNE) study, consisting of 522 Dutch offspring of patients receiving treatment for depression and/or anxiety disorders, was used. Contrary to expectation, age was not related to the overall number of symptoms and was only related to two specific somatic/sleep symptoms, “I have low energy for no reason” and “I often lie awake for hours before falling asleep”. Unexpectedly, gender did not moderate the association between age and number of symptoms. Overall, the lack of significance may be due to the narrow age range of the sample. Nonetheless, the significance of the two energy-related symptoms highlights the need to investigate the role of energy in the development of depression and anxiety disorders.