14 DAY TRIAL // Quite often, new mothers become depressed after they give birth. The condition, called postpartum depression, has a huge influence on the development and behavior of the baby. Now, scientists show that treating the disorder improves infants' behavior as much as a year after the treatment concludes.
But this correlation only holds true when women are treated successfully. If the therapies doctors prescribe fail, then their children do not register any type of behavior improvement, experts say.
The children's progress is gradual, and the improvement is generally discernible for as much as a year, after which time it peaks. Details of the new work were published in the latest issue of the respected American Journal of Psychiatry.
Additionally, the same study reveals, the speed at which mother recover is directly proportional to how fast kids improve their behavior. The degree of improvement is also boosted if mother stop being depressed faster, PsychCentral reports.
“If you treat the mother when she is depressed and don’t even go through the process of treating the children of these mothers, they still get better as their mothers get better,” Dr. Madhukar Trivedi says.
“It is very rare to treat a patient and have an impact on people around the patient that is this significant,” adds the investigator, who was a coauthor of the new paper.
“One year after their mothers’ remissions, these children continued to show further improvement.. This is almost unbelievable,” the expert adds. Recently, more and more studies are being conducted on the effects postpartum depression has on the evolution of newborns.
Official statistics conducted by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), reveals that nearly 8.3 percent of all adolescents and 2.5 percent of children in the United States are depressed.
“Depression should not be taken lightly. For kids’ sakes, we should be very aggressive in treating patients, particularly mothers. The more improved care we can provide to depressed mothers, the greater extent we can positively benefit their children,” Trivedi elaborates.
A strange discovery that past studies made shows that the onset of depression has now moved further earlier in life than in past decades. This means that children, for example, become depressed at an earlier age than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
“The take-home message is this: The faster we can get mothers better, the greater impact on their children. When we see a patient/mother with depression, we need to treat them aggressively and fast and get them as close to remission as possible,” the team leader adds.
“In the long term, children will have a better outcome than if you take more time to get their mothers better,” Trivedi concludes.