Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

DOI

10.1186/s12884-021-04308-0

Publication Title

BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

Volume

21

Issue

1

Pages

827 (1-10)

Abstract

Background

Perinatal (antenatal and postpartum) depression impacts approximately 12% of mothers. Perinatal depression can impact everyday functioning for mothers, and the relationship with, and development of, their children. The purpose of this study was to investigate depression trajectories from the antenatal period through 54-months postpartum and associations with child body mass index at 54-months postpartum.

Methods

This study applied latent growth modeling to the Growing Up in New Zealand study, which is a longitudinal pregnancy cohort study that provides nationally representative-level data, to investigate associations between depression at three time points (antenatal, 9-months postpartum, 54-months postpartum) and child body mass index at 54-months (n=4897).

Results

The average slope of depression for this sample is low and decreases over time. When child BMI was added to the model as an outcome variable, both antenatal depression (B=.25, pppχ2 (9) = 39.60, p < .05, SRMR = 0.01, CFI = .99, RMSEA = 0.03, BIC=53213).

Conclusions

Our findings align with the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease theory and imply that both the physical and mental health of mothers during pregnancy may be important indicators of child growth and development outcomes. Early intervention directed towards women who have even mild depression scores during pregnancy may promote healthy child development outcomes. Additionally, given the heterogeneity of depressive symptoms over time seen in this study, multiple assessment periods across the postpartum period may be valuable to adequately address and support maternal mental health.

Comments

© The Authors 2021.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Original Publication Citation

Farewell, C. V., Donohoe, R., Thayer, Z., Paulson, J., Nicklas, J., Walker, C., Waldie, K., & Leiferman, J. A. (2021). Maternal depression trajectories and child BMI in a multi-ethnic sample: A latent growth modeling analysis. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 21(1), 1-10, Article 827. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-021-04308-0

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