Potential metabolic monitoring indicators of suicide attempts in first episode and drug naive young patients with major depressive disorder: A cross-sectional study

Backgrounds: Major depressive disorder is an ordinary mental disorder, suicide and physical health deterioration are two major sequelae. Some studies indicate that metabolic levels are associated with suicide attempt. Previous studies have focused on the relationship between suicide attempts and metabolism in elderly patients with MDD, while ignore the young people. The aim of this study is to find the potential relationship between suicide attempts and metabolism in young MDD patients to find a promising way to effectively prevent and ultimately reduce suicide in young MDD patients.

Methods: Cross-sectional design was employed in the study.740 patients aged between 18 and 45 years old with MDD had been consecutively recruited in this study, 128 of whom had suicide attempts. Their serum samples which used to monitor fasting blood glucose, serum lipids as well as socio-demographic characteristics were collected. Besides, some clinical scales were also employed to measure symptoms of anxiety, depression and other conditions.

Results: This study indicated that compared with non-suicide attempters, suicide attempters in young patients with MDD showed higher levels of FBG, TC, LDL-C (all p <0.05) and lower levels of HDL-C(p<0.001). Further logistic regression analysis suggested that suicide attempts were associated with increased FBG with an odd ratio (OR) of 1.832, decreased HDL-C with an OR of 1.891 and obvious anxiety with an OR of 4.103.

Conclusions: suicide attempts in young patients with MDD may be predicted by metabolic levels in the future. And our findings suggested that the level of FBG and HDL-C can be promising biomarkers to predict the occurrence of this event.