Don't forget the late bloomers : hormones predict longitudinal depression in ninth grade girls

Adolescent girls, who are at elevated risk for the development of depressive symptoms, undergo a number of sweeping changes across multiple internal domains at the same time that they are experiencing the external transition to high school. The underlying ways in which the interaction of biology and environment influence this risk at a time when adolescents are motivated to fit in socially with their peers are important to understand in order to better predict individual risk. Here we hypothesized that two of the hormones that surge near and at puberty, cortisol and estradiol, may be interacting with perceived pubertal development to predict longitudinal risk for depressive symptoms in a group (N=79) of ninth graders from a single high school in Texas. Findings showed that girls with elevated estradiol and cortisol levels, who also reported low pubertal development relative to peers at the start of ninth grade (1 standard deviation below the mean) were at elevated risk of depressive symptoms in the spring of 9th grade (8 month follow-up) and the spring of 10th grade (20 month follow up). These findings highlight the need for more research that incorporates multiple measures of pubertal development in models of psychopathological risk in adolescence.