Depression and anxiety disorders are common at all ages. Approximately one out of four people in the Netherlands will be faced with them at some time during their lives. It is still not clear why some people recover quickly and why others suffer for long periods of time. The Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) is set up to investigate the course of depression and anxiety disorders over a period of several years. The main aim of NESDA is to determine the (psychological, social, biological and genetic) factors that influence the development and the long-term prognosis of depression and anxiety disorders.

The NESDA cohort

In 2004 we recruited 2981 participants with and without symptoms from primary care practices and specialised mental health institutions in the regions of Amsterdam, Leiden and Groningen. The ZonMw GeestKracht program has subsidized the study until 2012, after that the study is mainly subsidized by the Amsterdam UMC, Leiden University Medical Center and University Medical Center Groningen.

Since 2004, we have conducted 7 follow-up assessments and we are currently setting up our 8th assessment. Since 2014, we have also included 367 brothers and sisters of NESDA respondents and we are currently recruiting the offspring of participants.

Current NESDA cohort: 3348 subjects (2981 + 367 sibs, 67% female, 33% male). Of the 2981 people recruited at baseline (2004), about 2000 people are still participating.

NESDA is FAIR

NESDA fully adheres to best-practice FAIR data principles: our data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Available data can be located via a public data listing resource. You can download the table of NESDA instruments including data-codes below. Based on this, researchers can file a data request (analysis plan). Once after review your  analysis plan is approved, access is granted to the requested data. The data can be downloaded from the central NESDA data repository. These data files are available in a standard data format (SPSS), ready for further analysis. The reusability of the NESDA data, and the commitment of the NESDA consortium to long-term data stewardship, is illustrated by the large number of scientific articles that were published in the past two decades. Furthermore, a NESDA special issue was recently published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

• Overview of available data: NESDA measurement instruments.
• NESDA’s data access policy.
• Contact us if you are not part of the NESDA consortium. In that way we can check for overlap with other research plans and help you to cooperate with expert NESDA researchers.
• The last step is to send us your NESDA analysis plan.
• NESDA Procedure Publication plans NESDA_2024
• For researchers of institutions that have not signed a consortium agreement, an additional Data Sharing Agreement is necessary after they obtained approval of their analysis plan.