Infant Exposure to Maternal Depression Affects Later Brain Development, Study Shows

Exposure to maternal depression during the first months of life may have a lasting negative impact on brain development, suggests astudy published Monday inAJP in Advance.“These findings suggest that the perinatal period, particularly the postnatal period, may be critical for prevention of maternal depressive symptoms in view of the long-term association with child brain development,” wrote Runyu Zou, B.Med., M.P.H., of Erasmus Medical College, the Netherlands, a nd colleagues.The study included a total of 3,469 mother-child pairs who participated in the Generation R Study, a Dutch population-based study. Zou and colleagues measured maternal depression using the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), a validated self-report questionnaire, at four periods —during pregnancy (approximately 20 weeks' gestation), postpartum (child age 2 months), early childhood (age 3 years), and preadolescence (age 10 years).The researchers measured the children ’s brain development at age 10 using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); emotional and behavioral problems also were measured at age 10 using the Brief Problem Monitor.Higher maternal depressive symptom scores at all four time points were associated with smaller total gray matter volume in children at age 10. However, after adjusting for possible confounding factors, only exposure to maternal depressive symptoms when the child was 2 months old remained significant. Specifically, a one-point increase on the BSI depressive symptom scale corre...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: ajp in advance child brain development maternal depression MRI perinatal period prevention reduced grey matter two year's old Source Type: research