Association between eczema and risk of depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 188,495 participants

• Published in: Journal of affective disorders Vol. 238; pp. 458 - 464
• Main Authors: Bao, Qinyi, Chen, Lina, Lu, Zhiyu, Ma, Yongyan, Guo, Lili, Zhang, Shuaishuai, Huang, Xiaoping, Xu, Suling, Ruan, Liemin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Adult; Clinical Trials as Topic; Depression; Depression - complications; Depression - therapy; Eczema; Eczema - complications; Eczema - therapy; Evidence-Based Medicine; Female; Humans; Mental health; Meta-analysis; Risk; Depression; Eczema; Mental health; Meta-analysis
• ISSN: 0165-0327; 1573-2517
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2018.05.007

•Patients with eczema were associated with an increased risk of depression.•U.S. patients might have a higher risk, but there was no significant difference among patients from different regions.•Clinical doctors should continue to be more aware of the importance of mental state and psychological examination. Several studies were conducted to investigate the association between eczema and risk of depression. This was important because the care of patients with eczema might be inadequate if their psychological problems were not also recognized and treated. However, these studies had some inherent limitations such as small sample sizes or lack of controlling for potential confounders. Further, little was known about psychological co-morbidity of eczema from a global perspective. We conducted a systematic literature search in PubMed (1966 through January 26th 2017), Cochrane Library (the Cochrane central register of controlled trials, up to January 26th 2017), Scopus (up to December 31st 2016) and Embase (1980 through January 26th 2017) supplemented by manual searches of bibliographies and conference proceedings. The relative risk (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was estimated. Ten studies with a total of 188,495 patients were included. Overall, the random effects model summarizing all comparisons suggested a positive association between eczema and risk of depression, the pooled RR was 2.02 (95% confidence interval 1.76 to 2.31, I² = 33.7%). Similar results were observed in subgroup analysis by region. Methodological limitations such as selection biases, sample sizes, severity of other diseases, treatment strategy, age and other factors might have influenced the results. Our study showed that patients with eczema were associated with an increased risk of depression. These findings implicated that clinical doctors should continue to be more aware of the association between eczema and the risk of depression.