Endocrine Abstracts

Objective: Higher anxiety/depression scores can be connected with food preference of carbohydrates, with increased insulin secretion and thus can lead to insulin resistance. Three hypotheses were postulated: 1. more depressive (still in the normal range) subjects do not differ in the central serotoninergic activity from those less depressive. 2. the former do not differ in food preference and 3. in insulin resistance from the latter.

Methods: healthy men, 30–55 years, 9 lean (44.5±7.7 years, BMI 22.8±1.8 kg/m²) and 8 obese (45.3±6.0 years, /ns/ BMI 30.5±4.0 kg/m² /P=0.0005/) were involved in the study, which was approved by the local Ethical Comittee. The study protocol included filling in the SCL-90 questionnaire (for excluding psychopathology), self-assessing questionnaires for depression and anxiety (SAS, SDA), carbohydrate craving questionnaire (CCQ), 3-days diet records, 4-hours hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp on two insulin levels (1mU/kg/min and 10mU/kg/min) with calculating the metabolic clearance of glucose: MCR1, MCR2 and citaloprame challange test with 0.3 mg/kg citaloprame infusion followed by plasma sampling for prolactine at –30,−5,0,15,30,45,60,90,120,150 minutes and calculation of area under the curve for prolactine (AUC/PRL). ANOVA, Kruskall-Walis test and linear regression were used for statistical analyses.

Results: No correlations were found between AUC/PRL and SAS/SDA scores. Positive correlations were determined between SAS and SDA scores and % of carbohydrates in diet records (r=0.74; P<0.01, resp. r=0.75; P<0.01) and between depression/anxiety scores (SCL-90) and CCQ score (0.53; P<0.01, resp.0.54; P<0.01). We have not observed any relationships between central serotoninergic activity respectively SAS/SDA scores and MCR1/ MCR2.

Conclucions: We have proved that the subjects with higher depression/anxiety scores prefer more carbohydrates in the food. However, we have not observed any relationships between insulin resistance and depressive/anxiety scores or the central serotoninergic activity.

The study was supported by VZ MSM 0021620814.