Hit by the baby blues

Published: March 20, 2012

Credit : iStockphoto © Catherine Yeulet

Many Norwegian women postpone pregnancy until they have completed their education and are well established on their career path. This may make them more vulnerable to postpartum depression.

“There are some indications that older, first-time mothers are vulnerable to postpartum depression (PPD), perhaps because they are used to being in control of their own lives: they have completed a long education and established a career before they have children. But you can’t control a baby; on the contrary, you have to be extremely flexible. Several of the women I interviewed said themselves that this contributed to the huge feeling of letdown when things did not turn out as they had planned,” says Silje Marie Haga, who recently defended her doctoral thesis Identifying risk factors for postpartum depressive symptoms: the importance of social support, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation.

International studies have found that teenage mothers are at increased risk of postpartum depression, and previously this group has received extra attention. But in Norway this is a small group. Haga therefore believes that initiatives should now be targeted towards the much larger group of older mothers.

“Having very clear expectations and a great need for control is a risk factor. Those who prepare themselves to a very high degree for how life with the child will be have a hard time when things do not go as planned. So it’s not the need for control in itself, but rather the failure to achieve specific expectations that can trigger a depression. In contrast, women who take a more relaxed approach to motherhood with more undefined expectations cope better with unexpected challenges,” Haga observes.

She stresses that she is not warning women against postponing pregnancy, but that she believes it is vital to be aware of this correlation. This gives an opportunity to launch initiatives targeted towards this group of women so that they acquire more realistic expectations of what lies ahead. [continue reading…]

Marriage: it helps mend broken hearts

Published: March 20, 2012
brideandgroom

Getting married can have consequences for the health of your heart, years later.

Married adults who undergo heart surgery are more than three times more likely to survive the next three months than single people who have the same surgery, a new study finds.

“That’s a dramatic difference in survival rates for single people, during the most critical post-operative recovery period,” says Ellen Idler, a sociologist at Emory University and lead author of the study. “We found that marriage boosted survival whether the patient was a man or a woman.”

The Journal of Health and Social Behavior is publishing the results, which were co-authored by David Boulifard and Richard Contrada, both from Rutgers University. The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging.

While the most striking difference in outcomes occurred during the first three months, the study showed that the strong protective effect of marriage continues for up to five years following coronary artery bypass surgery. Overall, the hazard of mortality is nearly twice as great for unmarried as it is for married patients about to undergo the surgery.

“The findings underscore the important role of spouses as caregivers during health crises,” Idler says. “And husbands were apparently just as good at caregiving as wives.” [continue reading…]

Is depression an evolutionary byproduct of the ability to fight infection?

Published: March 19, 2012
depressed woman

"The basic idea is that depression and the genes that promote it were very adaptive for helping people—especially young children—not die of infection in the ancestral environment, even if those same behaviors are not helpful in our relationships with other people," says psychiatrist Charles Raison.Credit: iStockphoto

Depression is common enough – afflicting one in ten adults in the United States — that it seems the possibility of depression must be “hard-wired” into our brains. This has led biologists to propose several theories to account for how depression, or behaviors linked to it, can somehow offer an evolutionary advantage.

Some previous proposals for the role of depression in evolution have focused on how it affects behavior in a social context. A pair of psychiatrists addresses this puzzle in a different way, tying together depression and resistance to infection. They propose that genetic variations that promote depression arose during evolution because they helped our ancestors fight infection.

An outline of their proposal appears online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. [continue reading…]

Cell phone use in pregnancy may cause behavioral disorders in offspring

Published: March 19, 2012
Pregnant woman and cell phone texting

Image: iStockphoto

Exposure to radiation from cell phones during pregnancy affects the brain development of offspring, potentially leading to hyperactivity, Yale School of Medicine researchers have determined.

The results, based on studies in mice, are published in the March 15 issue of Scientific Reports, a Nature publication.

“This is the first experimental evidence that fetal exposure to radiofrequency radiation from cellular telephones does in fact affect adult behavior,” said senior author Dr. Hugh S. Taylor, professor and chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences.

Taylor and co-authors exposed pregnant mice to radiation from a muted and silenced cell phone positioned above the cage and placed on an active phone call for the duration of the trial. A control group of mice was kept under the same conditions but with the phone deactivated.

The team measured the brain electrical activity of adult mice that were exposed to radiation as fetuses, and conducted a battery of psychological and behavioral tests. They found that the mice that were exposed to radiation tended to be more hyperactive and had reduced memory capacity. Taylor attributed the behavioral changes to an effect during pregnancy on the development of neurons in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is a developmental disorder associated with neuropathology localized primarily to the same brain region, and is characterized by inattention and hyperactivity.

“We have shown that behavioral problems in mice that resemble ADHD are caused by cell phone exposure in the womb,” said Taylor. “The rise in behavioral disorders in human children may be in part due to fetal cellular telephone irradiation exposure.”

Taylor said that further research is needed in humans to better understand the mechanisms behind these findings and to establish safe exposure limits during pregnancy. Nevertheless, he said, limiting exposure of the fetus seems warranted. [continue reading…]

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