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BMI and mental health: Case study using ESDS data

Article dated: 31 May 2012

Does your Body Mass Index (BMI) have an effect on your mental health? Using adult psychiatric morbidity data from ESDS that also gave a measure of BMI, researchers from University College London and the University of Southampton have been investigating whether your BMI is related to developing common mental disorders such as depression or anxiety.

After looking at variables including age and gender they found that amongst young men the relationship was U-shaped, so those over- or underweight had a higher probability of developing a mental disorder, but for young women they found that the probability increased as BMI increased. For older people the relationship between the two was weaker.

This research is just one of over a hundred case studies currently featured in the ESDS case study library. More details can be found here about the research’s aims, results, methodology and outputs, as well as further details about the data used.

• Does your BMI reflect your chance of experiencing common mental disorders?
• Browse the case study library