Mothers Who Suffered Depression During Pregnancy May Pass Mental Condition To Daughters

Depression may not only arise out of dire circumstances. A recent study has revealed that pregnant women who confronted bouts of depression during pregnancy may pass it on to their children, most especially to their daughters.

Researchers from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) studied 35 families who were not known to have suffered from depression during pregnancy and correlated their findings with previous animal studies on depression. It was found that the corticolimbic system of a mother and daughter are more similar as compared to that of a mother and son.

The corticolimbic system is the area responsible for the regulation and processing of emotions. It is also the area that responds to danger. Hence, disorders like depression during pregnancy are associated with this system. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the gray matter volume of the parents and children's corticolimbic systems were measured, giving them an avenue to compare and correlate the brain structures.

According to Dr. Fumiko Hoeft, Ph.D., the lead researcher of the study that the results does not mean that mothers are to blame for depression suffered by their daughters later on in life, Medical News Today reported. "Many factors play a role in depression: genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment, and life experiences, to name only three. Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it," she said.

"It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain," Dr. Hoeft also said about the research as reported in Times of India. "This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns."

Other disorders that could be properly addressed using the study include anxiety, autism, schizophrenia and many more. These are disorders where inheriting brain patterns from parents have an impact on. Hoeft believed that the recent findings regarding depression during pregnancy can help in understanding the manner by which genetics, along with the environment affect the functions of the brain.