The Contribution of Health Behaviors to Depression Risk Across Birth Cohorts.

Background: More recent birth cohorts are at a higher depression risk than cohorts born in the early 20th century. We aimed to investigate to what extent changes in alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, and obesity contribute to these birth cohort variations.

Methods: We analyzed panel data from US adults born 1916-1966 enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 163,760 person-years).

The Impact of Unemployment on Antidepressant Purchasing: Adjusting for Unobserved Time-constant Confounding in the g-Formula.

Background: The estimated effect of unemployment on depression may be biased by time-varying, intermediate, and time-constant confounding. One of the few methods that can account for these sources of bias is the parametric g-formula, but until now this method has required that all relevant confounders be measured.

Methods: We combine the g-formula with methods to adjust for unmeasured time-constant confounding.