Dietary Magnesium And Calcium Intake And Risk Of Depression

Background: Depression is an important public health problem.The aim of the present study was to examine the association of dietary magnesium and calcium intake with risk of depression.Methods: We assessed the association between dietary magnesium and calcium intake and risk of depression in a nationally representative sample of 17,730 adults from the2007-2008,2009-2010,2011-2012 and 2013-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.Magnesium intake was assessed by 24-hour dietary recalls.Depression was assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9.Student’s t-test,chi-square test,and rank-sum test were used to compare the difference of basic characteristics between depression and non-depression patients.We used the Taylor series linearization to adjust variance estimation.Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were conducted to examine the associations between dietary magnesium and calcium with depression.The relative importance of the influencing factors of depressive symptoms was analyzed by means of superiority analysis.The restricted cubic spline analyses were applied to explore the dose –response relationship between magnesium and calcium intake with the risk of depression.Results:A total of 17730 adults aged 18 years or older were included in this study.The results of dominance analysis showed that the five former influential factors of depression were family income,recreational physical activity,gender,smoking and hypertension.Dietary magnesium and calcium were ranked sixth and thirteenth,respectively.Dietary magnesium intake was inversely associated with risk of depression in unadjusted model,and the inverse correlation was still significant after multi-factor adjustment.The multivariate adjusted odds ratio（95% confidence interval）of depression for the highest vs lowest category of dietary magnesium intake was 0.73（0.57-0.93）,0.68（0.52-0.89）,0.47（0.34-0.66）,respectively.In stratified analysis,dietary magnesium intake was inversely associated with risk of depression among women whereas no association was found among man.The inverse association between dietary magnesium intake and risk of depression was statistically significant among low energy and normal energy group.Dietary calcium intake was associated with a lower risk of depression in univariate logistic regression models.Theassociations were still existed after adjusting for age and sex.But after increased adjustment for other possible confounding factors（race,family income,BMI,smoking status,drinking,education,physical activity,diabetes,hypertension and total daily energy intake）,no significant correlation was found.A linear relationship(P_{for nonlinearity} = 0.34)was found between dietary magnesium intake and risk of depression in dose–response analysis.Conclusions: Dietary magnesium intake was inversely associated with the risk of depression in a linear manner in general population and women.There is no association between depressive symptoms with dietary calcium intake.The conclusions still need to be confirmed by larger prospective and experimental studies.