New Delhi | An analysis has found that maternal depression in late pregnancy is linked to psychotic symptoms in offspring later in adulthood.
The study of two decades' data of 5,329 adult offspring who participated in the US' Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children found distinct patterns of links between parental depression and later mental health symptoms.
Researchers, including those from Yale University's school of medicine, found that maternal depression at almost every stage in offspring development, from pregnancy onward, was linked with depressive symptoms in adulthood.
The findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, from eight months after birth onward, maternal depression was linked with anxiety symptoms in offspring.
"In this cohort study, analyses of 2 decades of data found distinct temporal associations between maternal and paternal depression and offspring psychiatric symptoms, and pregnancy was found to be a sensitive period in the association between maternal depression and offspring psychotic experiences," the authors wrote.
"Maternal prenatal depression at 32 weeks' gestation was associated with offspring psychotic symptoms," they said.
Psychotic symptoms in the offspring were assessed at age 24 through the standardised 'Psychosis-Like Symptoms Interview'.
Psychotic experiences are associated with, and predictive of, psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia.
The adult offsprings were evaluated for 12 aspects of psychotic experiences, including hallucinations, delusions, and thought insertion, since they were aged 12 years.
The findings are in line with those from previous studies in childhood and adolescence that a chronic exposure to depressive symptoms in parents was associated with an increased cumulative chance for elevated symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis in adulthood, the authors said.
