VEGFA and depressive symptom measurement: When compared to that in healthy volunteers, the expression of VEGF in patients with depression tends to increase in serum and plasma (Castillo et al., 2020), while quite a few studies have detected an average decrease in VEGF levels in patients with depression (Du Preez et al., 2021), which may be due to inadequate assessment of environmental factors such as gender, age, and body mass index.