Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. It affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless. They may lose interest in activities that once were pleasurable, experience loss of appetite or overreactin...

Whether defined as a symptom, a syndrome, a single disease, or a ' spectrum' of biopsychosocial manifestations, depression is at present the most common mental disorder in all the urbanizedindustrial societies and its frequency appears to be increasing in the developing countries. Klerman's observation that, after an 'age of anxiety', the world is entering an 'age of melancholy' (Klerman, 1978)...

BACKGROUND Most research to date on the role of maltreatment experiences in depression has focused on physical and sexual maltreatment. However, several researchers have theorized that emotional maltreatment may be more strongly linked to depression. Furthermore, prospective studies in this area are lacking. This study addressed these issues by examining whether experiences of current emotional...

OBJECTIVE The main goal of this paper is to obtain a classification model based on feed-forward multilayer perceptrons in order to improve postpartum depression prediction during the 32 weeks after childbirth with a high sensitivity and specificity and to develop a tool to be integrated in a decision support system for clinicians. MATERIALS AND METHODS Multilayer perceptrons were trained on d...

OBJECTIVE Mental defeat has been implicated in precipitating suicide with effects not explained by depression. It has also been found to be elevated in people who are most distressed and disabled by chronic pain. This study examined the role of mental defeat in predicting suicide intent among chronic pain patients and compared the predictive value of mental defeat with other established pain an...

Depression is associated with protracted despondent mood, blunted emotional reactivity, and dysregulated parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity. PNS activity is commonly indexed via cardiac output, using indictors of its level (resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) or fluctuations (RSA reactivity). RSA reactivity can reflect increased or decreased PNS cardiac output (RSA augmentati...

Complex diseases such as major depression affect people over time in complicated patterns. Longitudinal data analysis is thus crucial for understanding and prognosis of such diseases and has received considerable attention in the biomedical research community. Traditional classification and regression methods have been commonly applied in a simple (controlled) clinical setting with a small numb...

In this article we discuss variable selection for decision making with focus on decisions regarding when to provide treatment and which treatment to provide. Current variable selection techniques were developed for use in a supervised learning setting where the goal is prediction of the response. These techniques often downplay the importance of interaction variables that have small predictive ...

OBJECTIVE Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) involves episodic memory. The person who presents aMCI has a high risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, prediction of deterioration to dementia in cases of aMCI can be confounded with depression due to lack of specificity on selective memory tests. Finding a test sensitive to aMCI but not to depression would be potentially most...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the prediction of depression on a group of Iranian older adults based on components of health locus of control. METHOD Sixty-six men and 42 women over the age of 55 were recruited from the retirement clubs in Shiraz, using convenience sampling. The participants completed the research questionnaires including the Geriatric Depression Scale (GD...