Day Care May Help Kids of Depressed Moms

They showed fewer signs of emotional problems if they weren't cared for solely by their mother

By Randy Dotinga

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Young children of depressed mothers may develop fewer emotional problems if they spend time in some kind of day care, a new study suggests.

The Canadian research doesn't definitively prove that kids gain benefits from getting care from people other than their troubled mothers, and it doesn't examine the potentially high costs of alternative types of care. Nor does the study look at the role of fathers in caring for the kids.

However, experts said the study provides strong evidence of the value of day care when a mom is struggling with depression.

"The main message is that day care looks like it makes a huge difference in the long term," said Alan Kazdin, a child psychiatry professor at Yale University. "It's not trivial, and it's not just babysitting."

At issue are the children of mothers with depression, a condition that's estimated to strike 30 percent to 40 percent of mothers of childbearing age at some point. While it's difficult to fully understand how these kids are affected, "depressed mothers are likely to be more disengaged, inconsistent, negative and unresponsive, and less likely to be warm and supportive," explained Susan Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

In the new study, the Canadian researchers followed 1,759 children between the ages of 5 months and 5 years. The investigators tracked the children's emotional problems (such as separation anxiety and inability to socialize with others) after the age of 17 months.

The researchers also followed their mothers, looking for signs of depression. And they monitored whether the kids were regularly cared for by relatives, outside babysitters or in day-care centers.

After adjusting statistics so they wouldn't be thrown off by various factors, the investigators found that about 12 percent of kids of non-depressed mothers showed signs of emotional problems, said study author Catherine Herba, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Quebec at Montreal. But that number jumped to 32 percent among children of mothers who were depressed and didn't receive regular child care from anyone other than their mothers.

However, that number fell to 7 percent among kids whose mothers were depressed and were in day care; it fell to between 15 percent and 18 percent for those whose mothers were depressed and were cared for by a relative or babysitter, Herba said.

What's going on? Campbell said group child care can provide structure, toys and activities, and opportunities to socialize with others kids while giving stressed-out mothers a break.

Herba said future research should explore other aspects of how child care influences the lives of kids, such as how the quality of care affects the outcome. For now, she said, "we need to think about how we can better support mothers and families."

The study was published online June 19 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

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Rapid weight gain during recovery? Really depressed :(

Just starting to recover...last week and taking it slow. I upped my calorie intake to 1500-1700 and I gained 3 kilograms?? Isn't a pound of fat 3500 calories?

I heard that after being in starvation, your body starts "hanging on to the fat" to prevent starvation but how is it possible if I'm not eating over?

I've been eating less than 200-900 calories for half a year with occasional binges but I think my metabolism varies a lot, mostly good. Today I've been trying to force myself to eat more calories but I always feel full and constipated. :( And I feel so bad about it and burst into tears for no reason at all. I'm up to a hundred pounds and I know I'm a horrible person for thinking this but I feel so fat and ugly.

Tomorrow I'm going to challenge myself not to "calculate" and eat some fear foods. But I'm really scared to gain so much. Is this fat or water weight? And how long will it go way (or ever?!)

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Daily Gene Rhythms May Be Off in Depressed People

Study found 'clock' in brain was disrupted in autopsies of those who suffered mental disorder at time of death

By Amy Norton

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 13 (HealthDay News) -- Just like you, the genes in your brain follow a daily routine. But that natural rhythm may be thrown off in people with depression, a new study suggests.

Researchers say the findings shed new light on what goes wrong in the brain when depression strikes. And they hope the results, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could spur new therapies down the road.

It has long been known that your body processes follow daily circadian rhythms, and that the "master clock" orchestrating it all exists in the brain. That clock mainly responds to light and darkness in your surroundings.

Scientists have also thought that gene activity in animals' brains follows a daily ebb and flow. But seeing whether that's true in the human brain is a lot tougher, said researcher Huda Akil.

If you want to look for daily rhythms in hormone activity, Akil said, you can take multiple blood samples from the same people over the course of 24 hours. You cannot, however, investigate the brain that way.

To get around the problem, Akil's team studied autopsied brain tissue from 89 people who had died at different times of day. That way, they could look at each person's gene activity at the time of death and search for differences from one individual to the next.

"Hundreds of genes emerged as having a rhythm based on the time of day," said Akil, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

That rhythm was clear in brain tissue from the 55 people with no history of psychiatric disorders. Akil said her team was able to look at an individual's gene activity and correctly guess that person's time of death within an hour.

They could not, however, do that for the 34 individuals who were suffering from major depression at the time of death. Their gene activity patterns were too varied.

"This is very clear evidence that the 'clock' in the brain is disrupted in depression," Akil said.

That makes sense, since doctors and researchers have long seen signs of a disturbed circadian rhythm in people with depression, said Eva Redei, a professor of psychiatry at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Those signs, Redei said, include sleep problems -- like sleeping too much or too little -- and abnormal activity in the "stress hormone" cortisol, which follows a daily rhythm. There also is a form of depression known as seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in which people suffer symptoms during the short days of winter but feel better during the sunnier seasons.

Experts do not know the precise cause of SAD, but Redei said it involves problems with the circadian rhythms.

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Depressed Dads Affect Their Kids Even Before Born

By Rita Rubin
WebMD Health News

Jan. 7, 2013 -- Children whose dads were depressed during the pregnancy are more likely to exhibit emotional and behavioral problems at age 3, new research suggests.

The finding comes from an ongoing study of more than 30,000 Norwegian children. When their mothers were nearly halfway through their pregnancy, their fathers completed a mental health questionnaire that assessed anxiety and depression symptoms. The researchers also collected information from the parents about the mothers’ pre- and postnatal mental health and the children’s emotional and behavioral development at 36 months of age.

Three percent of the fathers had high levels of psychological distress, and their children had higher levels of emotional and behavioral problems -- even after the researchers took into account other possible contributing factors, such as the dad’s age, education, and marital status, and the mother’s mental health.

“This study suggests that some risk of future child emotional, behavioral, and social problems can be identified during pregnancy,” says researcher Anne Lise Kvalevaag, PsyD, a PhD candidate at the University of Bergen.

The researchers, whose report appears in the journal Pediatrics, cited several possible explanations for a link between fathers’ prenatal psychological distress and young children’s emotional and behavioral problems:

The children may have inherited a genetic susceptibility to such problems from their father.The expectant fathers’ depression may have negatively impacted the pregnant mothers’ mental health. A dad’s prenatal depression might simply predict he’ll be depressed after the baby is born.

“Fathers who have mental health difficulties during the prenatal period are likely to continue to have those difficulties during the child’s infancy, which may directly affect young children’s development,” says psychologist Elizabeth Harvey, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Harvey published a study last month in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology about the link between early fathering and children’s behavior problems. The study found that fathers’ depression when the children were 3 predicted behavior problems when they were 6.

In a study published in Maternal and Child Health Journal last August, Michael Weitzman, MD, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at New York University, found that depression in fathers was the single biggest predictor of depression in mothers. The study involved more than 7,000 U.S. moms and dads who lived with children aged 5 to 17.

In another study of approximately 22,000 kids in that same age group, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2011, Weitzman found that living with a father who had symptoms of depression and other mental health problems was associated with higher rates of emotional or behavioral problems in children.

Some of the negative consequences scientists attribute to the mother's depression might actually be due to the father's depression, Weitzman says. In addition, he says, depressed parents may be more likely to report their children as being depressed than non-depressed parents of kids who have the same behaviors.

Studies that follow fathers and children with or without psychological distress over time are needed to clarify the relationship between the mental health of dads and their offspring, Kvalevaag and her colleagues write.

While the Norwegian study has continued to collect mental health information from the mothers and children, it only questioned the fathers at 17 or 18 weeks into the pregnancy, Kvalevaag says.

Unfortunately, Weitzman says, “depression in fathers is a profoundly overlooked public health problem."

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