The authors of the article are the researchers and writers, who have already proved their professionalism due to their work at Johns Hopkins University. Their experience and achievements are known in the university, and in the spheres, they are involved in worldwide. In the article, not much information is given about the team, just brief facts that they are a part of the Johns Hopkins University team from the departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Mental Health, and Epidemiology.
Google searching provides more information about each author and helps to comprehend that their credentials, the credibility of information, and ethos are worth recognizing. For example, Mr. Onyike has a great professional experience from a Medical Officer at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria to the Director of the Frontotemporal Dementia & Young-Onset Dementias Program at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Crum has achieved a lot in the sphere of psychiatric disorders’ epidemiology and prevention.
The article touches upon the questions concerning the possible relations between obesity, as an important public health problem, and depression, as a chronic medical condition. The authors aim at investigating whether this kind of relationship may depend on the severity of obesity or the influences of obesity and depression using the information from the Third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (Onyike, Crum, Lee, Lyketsos, and Eaton 1140). They hypothesize and prove that obesity, as a heterogeneous condition, cannot associate with depression, but the association of severe obesity and depression is possible. This is why additional studies are necessary to clarify the relations between obesity and depression, taking into consideration a number of potential risk factors.
There are many interesting ideas offered in the article. The authors underline several strengths of their project, and one of them is the possibility to introduce “the analyses by gender, which allowed… to identify gender-specific patterns of association” (Onyike et al. 1145). The point is that at the beginning of the article, it is stated that only “some found an association between obesity and higher rates of depression in women but not in men; others reported inverse associations between obesity and depression in both women and men” (Onyike et al. 1139). This is why it is interesting to observe how the authors of the chosen article find the necessary balance and introduce an interesting approach to overcome the challenges and shortages they have already noticed in the past investigations.
One of the questions that may bother the reader of the article is why the authors do not find it necessary to conduct their own independent research but rely on the interviews between 1988 and 1994. The article was written in 2003, a number of factors that may predetermine the development of obesity or depression can appear during this period and have to be taken into account in such kind of research. Maybe, they fail to give more explanations of why they have paid attention to that particular period of time.
It seems that the authors provide themselves with a kind of space for their further investigations and want to prove that the chosen topic can and has to be evaluated again. In general, the way of how the paper and research are organized is powerful indeed, and the authors prove that their work is worth attention and demonstrate their maturity and knowledge in the chosen sphere regarding the conditions under which they have to cooperate and analyze the material found.
Works Cited
Onyike, Chiadi, U., Crum, Rosa, M., Lee, Hochang, B., Lyketsos, Constantine, G. and Eaton, William, W. “Is Obesity Associated with Major Depression? Results from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.” American Journal of Epidemiology 158. 12 (2003): 1139-1147. Print.