yousef, ahmed
Journal Of The Oman Society Of Nephrology And Transplantation Journal Related Data
After obtaining the approval of the ethics committee of the Faculty of Medicine of the Alexandria University, eighty five ESRD patients (50 depressed and 35 nondepressed as classified by the HADS score) on maintenance HD for at least 6 months were recruited from the dialysis units of the Alexandria University Hospitals.
The HADS is a 14-item self-report scale measuring the presence of symptoms of both anxiety (seven items) and depression (seven items) during the past week. Each item is scored from 0 to 3; thus, the final score for each subscale is between 0 and 21. The HADS consists of depression (HADS-D) and anxiety (HADS-A) subscales[12].
An informed consent from the patients was obtained before carrying out the study. Patients with advanced liver disease, autoimmune diseases, those with a history of cerebrovascular stroke, those who were using hypnotics, and those with difficulty in communications were excluded.
Data including name, age, sex, past medical history, and data obtained from clinical examination were recorded at enrollment. Routine laboratory investigations were also recorded.
Serum level of BDNF was measured using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technique kit based on standard sandwich enzyme-linked immune-sorbent assay technology[25].
Data were fed to the computer and analyzed using IBM SPSS software package version 20.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, USA)[26]. Qualitative data were described using number and percent. Quantitative data were described using range (minimum and maximum), mean, SD, and median. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was used to verify the normality of distribution. Student t-test was used to compare normally distributed data and the Mann–Whitney test was used to compare abnormally distributed data. Spearman's coefficient was used to correlate quantitative variables. ROC was used to assess the performance of BDNF levels for the detection of depression. Significance of the obtained results was judged at the 5% level[27].
