Prepartum, postpartum and chronic depression effects on neonatal behavior
Section snippets
Prepartum, postpartum and chronic depression effects on neonatal behavior
Maternal depression has negative effects on infant behavior and physiology (Dawson, Panagiotides, Grofer Klinger, & Spieker, 1997; Field, 1995). Evidence for these effects has emerged as early as the prenatal period in some studies. For example, fetuses of depressed mothers show elevated resting heart rates (Allister, Lester, Carr, & Liu, 2001), greater activity levels (Dieter et al., in press) and increased physiological reactivity (Monk, Myers, Sloan, Ellman, & Fifer, 2003). Prenatal
Participants
Pregnant women were recruited during mid-pregnancy (Mean gestational age = 25.9 weeks; S.D. = 1.39; range = 23–27 weeks) from an ultrasound clinic at a university hospital. In order to control for fluctuations in depressed mood across pregnancy (Buckwalter et al., 1999; Hoffman & Hatch, 2000; Ritter, Hobfoll, Lavin, Cameron, & Hulsizer, 2000), we conducted the prepartum assessments within a narrow time period (23–27 weeks GA) during mid-gestation. The postpartum assessment was conducted within two
Demographics
Chi-square tests and analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted on the demographic variables. The groups did not differ on the demographic variables (see Table 1).
Maternal depression
A group (depressed/non-depressed) by observation period (prepartum/postpartum) repeated measures ANOVA on CES-D scores revealed a significant group by observation period interaction (F(3, 76) = 27.52, p < 0.001). This interaction was followed by Bonferroni corrected t-tests revealing the following (Table 2): (1) postpartum depressed
Discussion
Consistent with previous findings (Field et al., 2004, Jones et al., 1998), neonates of depressed mothers exhibited greater indeterminate sleep than neonates born to non-depressed mothers. Indeterminate sleep, a measure of sleep continuity, is an early marker of biobehavioral organization (Thoman, 1990) and has been found to relate to future cognitive function including performance on the Bayley mental scale at 6 and 12 months (Anders, Keener, & Kraemer, 1985) and IQ scores at 12 years (Sigman
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the mother-infant dyads who participated in this study. This research was supported by an NIMH Research Scientist Award (#MH00331), and an NIMH research Grant (#MH46586) to Tiffany Field, Ph.D., and funding from Johnson and Johnson.
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