Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchStressful Life Events During Pregnancy and Offspring Depression: Evidence From a Prospective Cohort Study
Section snippets
Sample
The sample was drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), an ongoing population-based study of the determinants of child health and development. The initial cohort consisted of 14,062 pregnant women with estimated delivery dates between April 1, 1991, and December 31, 1992. All participants provided informed consent, the study was approved by the ALSPAC Ethics and Law committee, and these analyses were approved by the Ottawa Health Science Network Research Ethics
Results
The prevalence of depression at age 17 to 18 years was 7.7% (Table 1). SLE scores ranged from 0 to 61, with a median of 6. The most commonly reported individual life events were prenatal tests for abnormality (53.4%), arguments with a partner (50.2%), and income reductions (20.8%). The events rated as most severe were death of a child (average severity rating among mothers who experienced the event: 3.38 on a 4-point scale), attempted abortion (3.28), and miscarriage scare (3.22).
Discussion
In this prospective study of 10,569 parents and offspring, we demonstrate that offspring of mothers exposed to stressful events during early pregnancy may be at increased risk for depression and elevated depressive symptoms at age 17 to 18 years, even after maternal depression, anxiety, and other known prenatal and early life risk factors were taken into account. This increased risk persisted after adjusting for stress in the late prenatal/early postnatal period, suggesting that exposure to
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The different role of adversity before and after birth in adolescent depression
2024, Journal of Affective DisordersDNA methylation as a mediator in the association between prenatal maternal stress and child mental health outcomes: Current state of knowledge
2022, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :In the Raine Study, results indicated that children of mothers who experienced five or more SLEs, regardless of timing (i.e., second or third trimester) and type of stressor (i.e., within or outside of participants' control), had over twice greater odds of experiencing clinically-significant internalizing symptoms by age 14 years (Robinson et al., 2011). Similarly, researchers from the ALSPAC cohort found that prenatal SLEs predicted depression symptoms and diagnoses in the offspring at age 17–18 years (Kingsbury et al., 2016). The children of mothers who were in the highest quartile of prenatal SLEs had nearly twice greater odds of experiencing consistently high depressive symptoms from early to late adolescence (Kingsbury et al., 2016).
Prenatal stress and offspring depression in adulthood: The mediating role of childhood trauma
2022, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :There is strong evidence that prenatal maternal depression is associated with offspring depression in adulthood (Rogers et al., 2020; Tirumalaraju et al., 2020). Prenatal family adversity such as financial or relationship difficulties have also been associated with offspring depression even after accounting for maternal mental health (Kingsbury et al., 2016; Najman et al., 2017). Both sources of prenatal stress have also been associated with alterations to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (Osborne et al., 2018; Van den Bergh et al., 2008), increased inflammation (Plant et al., 2016), and hyperresponsivity in the amygdala in the offspring (Knaap et al., 2018), offering support for a programming effect of prenatal stress on offspring depression through biologically mediated mechanisms (Hantsoo et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2015).
This article is discussed in an editorial by Dr. André Sourander on page 645.
The UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust (Grant ref: 102215/2/13/2) and the University of Bristol provide core support for ALSPAC. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program for IC. This research was additionally funded by the SickKids Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant SKF 116328).
Drs. Kingsbury and Weeks served as the statistical experts for this research.
Disclosure: Drs. Kingsbury, Weeks, Evans, Mahedy, Colman, and Mss. MacKinnon and Dykxhoorn report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.