BMC Public Health Research article Correlates of depressive symptoms among Latino and Non-Latino White adolescents: Findings from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey Rafael T Mikolajczyk1, Maren Bredehorst1, Nadia Khelaifat1, Claudia Maier1 and Annette E Maxwell*1,2 BioMed Central Open Access Address: 1School of Public Health, Department of Public Health Medicine, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany and 2School of Public Health and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, Division of Cancer Prevention & Control Research, University of California, Los Angeles, 650 Charles Young Dr. South, Room A2-125, CHS, Los Angeles, CA 90095-6900. USA Email: Rafael T Mikolajczyk - rmikolajczyk@uni-bielefeld.de; Maren Bredehorst - maren.bredehorst@uni-bielefeld.de; Nadia Khelaifat - nadia.khelaifat1@uni-bielefeld.de; Claudia Maier - clamaier@gmx.de; Annette E Maxwell* - amaxwell@ucla.edu * Corresponding author Published: 21 February 2007 BMC Public Health 2007, 7:21 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-7-21 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/21 Received: 3 July 2006 Accepted: 21 February 2007 © 2007 Mikolajczyk et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The prevalence of depression is increasing not only among adults, but also among adolescents. Several risk factors for depression in youth have been identified, including female gender, increasing age, lower socio-economic status, and Latino ethnic background. The literature is divided regarding the role of acculturation as risk factor among Latino youth. We analyzed the correlates of depressive symptoms among Latino and Non- Latino White adolescents residing in California with a special focus on acculturation. Methods: We performed an analysis of the adolescent sample of the 2003 California Health Interview Survey, which included 3,196 telephone-interviews with Latino and Non-Latino White adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17. Depressive symptomatology was measured with a reduced version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Acculturation was measured by a score based on language in which the interview was conducted, language(s) spoken at home, place of birth, number of years lived in the United States, and citizenship status of the adolescent and both of his/her parents, using canonical principal component analysis. Other variables used in the analysis were: support provided by adults at school and at home, age of the adolescent, gender, socio- economic status, and household type (two parent or one parent household). Results: Unadjusted analysis suggested that the risk of depressive symptoms was twice as high among Latinos as compared to Non-Latino Whites (10.5% versus 5.5 %, p < 0.001). The risk was slightly higher in the low acculturation group than in the high acculturation group (13.1% versus 9.7%, p = 0.12). Similarly, low acculturation was associated with an increased risk of depressive symptoms in multivariate analysis within the Latino subsample (OR 1.54, CI 0.97–2.44, p = 0.07). Latino ethnicity emerged as risk factor for depressive symptoms among the strata with higher income and high support at home and at school. In the disadvantaged subgroups (higher poverty, low support at home and at school) Non-Latino Whites and Latinos had a similar risk of depressive symptoms. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the differences in depressive symptoms between Non-Latino Whites and Latino adolescents disappear at least in some strata after adjusting for socio-demographic and social support variables. Page 1 of 9 (page number not for citation purposes)