Assessing the depression risk in the U.S. adults using nomogram

BACKGROUND: Depression has received a lot of attention as a common and serious illness. However, people are rarely aware of their current depression risk probabilities. We aimed to develop and validate a predictive model applicable to the risk of depression in US adults. METHODS: This study was conducted using the database of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2017–2012). In particular, NHANES (2007–2010) was used as the training cohort (n = 6015) for prediction model construction and NHANES (2011–2012) was used as the validation cohort (n = 2812) to test the model. Depression was assessed (defined as a binary variable) by the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Socio-demographic characteristics, sleep time, illicit drug use and anxious days were assessed using a self-report questionnaire. Logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate independent risk factors for depression. The nomogram has the advantage of being able to visualize complex statistical prediction models as risk estimates of individualized disease probabilities. Then, we developed two depression risk nomograms based on the results of logistic regression. Finally, several validation methods were used to evaluate the prediction performance of nomograms. RESULTS: The predictors of model 1 included gender, age, income, education, marital status, sleep time and illicit drug use, and model 2, furthermore, included anxious days. Both model 1 and model 2 showed good discrimination ability, with a bootstrap-corrected C index of 0.71 (95% CI, 0.69–0.73) and 0.85 (95% CI, 0.83–0.86), and an externally validated C index of 0.71 (95% CI, 0.68–0.74) and 0.83 (95% CI, 0.81–0.86), respectively, and had well-fitted calibration curves. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) values of the models with 1000 different weighted random sampling and depression scores of 10–17 threshold range were higher than 0.7 and 0.8, respectively. Calculated net reclassification improvement (NRI) and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) showed the discrimination or accuracy of the prediction models. Decision curve analysis (DCA) demonstrated that the depression models were practically useful. The network calculators work for participants to make personalized predictions. CONCLUSIONS: This study presents two prediction models of depression, which can effectively and accurately predict the probability of depression as well as helping the U.S. civilian non-institutionalized population to make optimal treatment decisions. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-022-12798-6.