Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchMaternal Postnatal Depression and the Development of Depression in Offspring Up to 16 Years of Age
Section snippets
Participants
Mothers (and children) were recruited at 2 months postpartum, and assessments conducted at 18 months, and 5, 8, 13 and 16 years. Initially, a community sample of mothers on postnatal wards of the Cambridge (UK) maternity hospital (N = 702) was screened with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale21 at 6 weeks postpartum. The response rate was 97%. Mothers were primiparous, aged 18 to 42 years, were cohabiting or married, and had healthy, full-term infants. The Standardized Psychiatric Interview
Results
Mean offspring age was 16.06 years (SD = 0.18 years; range, 15.75–17.00 years). There were minimal differences between index and control groups regarding socioeconomic status (I, II, and III nonmanual35: 61.5% for control versus 67.9% for PND), child gender (male 50% for control vs 47.2% for PND), and current family status (child resident with both biological parents, 87.5% for control versus 73.6% for PND).
Discussion
We report the occurrence of clinical depression in a community sample of adolescents within a prospective longitudinal study that uniquely included direct investigation of interpersonal psychology (mother–infant attachment) and indices of low resilience under social stress. Furthermore, we examined the role of ongoing family adversity to establish the extent to which it added to child risk, and accounted for any association between maternal PND and child disorder.
In line with other studies,11,
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Cited by (0)
The study was supported by grants from the Medical Research Council (G9324094) and the Tedworth Charitable Trust (TED76).
Disclosure: Drs. Murray, Arteche, Fearon, Halligan, Goodyer, and Cooper report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
This article is discussed in an editorial by Dr. David Reiss on page 431.