A Correlation of Nutritional Parameters in Patients with Depressive Disorders

This study is designed to find out association of nutritional parameters in patients with depressive disorder and Find out correlation of various components of nutrition with depression score. Whether, biochemical parameters which define nutrition status of patients make difference between the patients with depression and normal subjects. In this descriptiveanalytic study, all patients referred to psychiatric clinic for outpatient management, were studied. Fifty patients with depressive disorders were included. We selected fifty healthy controls without being any medical or psychiatric diagnosis. All patients and control subjects gave informed consent to participate in the study. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was filled for them to assess the severity of their depression. The blood samples were drawn after a 12-hour fasting for detecting Blood Glucose, lipid profile, Serum total protein, albumin, Iron , Calcium and Magnesium. Total cholesterol, triglyceride and High density lipoprotein cholesterol levels are significantly lower in patients with depressive disorder than the other groups. Iron, Calcium levels were significantly lower in patients with depressive disorder while Magnesium levels were significantly high than the control groups. These findings may be helpful in management of depression and better outcome. Although these results do not suggest that nutritional parameter can be used as biological markers to distinguish depressive disorders, larger samples are required to prove such results in the future.