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Maternal Prenatal Stress and Other Developmental Risk Factors for Adolescent Depression: Spotlight on Sex Differences

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Abstract

Maternal stress during pregnancy has been linked to premorbid abnormalities associated with depression (e.g., difficult temperament, cognitive deficits) in offspring. However, few studies have looked across developmental periods to examine maternal stress during pregnancy and offspring depression during adolescence and whether these associations differ by sex. The current study used data from 1711 mother-offspring dyads (offspring sex: 49.8% male) in a longitudinal birth cohort study. Maternal narratives collected during pregnancy were qualitatively coded for stress-related themes by independent raters. Latent class analysis (LCA) identified distinct subgroups of offspring based on exposure to maternal prenatal stress and other developmental factors from the prenatal, childhood, and adolescent periods that have been associated with depression and/or maternal prenatal stress. LCA identified subgroups that were compared to determine whether and to what extent they differed on adolescent depressive symptoms. LCA revealed a subgroup of “high-risk” individuals, characterized by maternal factors during pregnancy (higher ambivalence/negativity and lower positivity towards the pregnancy, higher levels of hassles, lower maternal education and higher maternal age at birth, higher pre-pregnancy BMI) and offspring developmental factors (decreased cognitive functioning during childhood and adolescence, lower perceived parental support during adolescence, and higher levels of maternal depression during adolescence). High-risk females exhibited elevated conduct symptoms and higher birth order, while high-risk males exhibited decreased internalizing symptoms and lower birth order. Both high-risk males and females reported elevated depressive symptoms during adolescence relative to their “low-risk” counterparts.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Barbara A. Cohn, Piera Cirillo, Lauren Zimmermann, and Nickilou Y. Krigbaum, our collaborators at the Child Health and Development Studies, for their thoughtful contributions to the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Temple University, 1701 N. 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Seth D. Maxwell, Anna M. Fineberg, Deborah A. Drabick, Shannon K. Murphy & Lauren M. Ellman

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  1. Seth D. Maxwell
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  2. Anna M. Fineberg
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  3. Deborah A. Drabick
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  4. Shannon K. Murphy
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  5. Lauren M. Ellman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lauren M. Ellman.

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Funding

This study was supported by funding to LME (R01 MH096478, Temple University start-up award, Schizophrenia research fellowship – 5 T32 MH018870–20) and AMF (National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to AMF – DGE-1144462). This study was also supported by the Department of Health and Human Services Contract HHSN275201100020C from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development, National Institutes of Health. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author (s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Maxwell, S.D., Fineberg, A.M., Drabick, D.A. et al. Maternal Prenatal Stress and Other Developmental Risk Factors for Adolescent Depression: Spotlight on Sex Differences. J Abnorm Child Psychol 46, 381–397 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-017-0299-0

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