The stable component of maternal depressive symptoms predicts offspring emotional and behavioral symptoms: a 9-years lon
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
The stable component of maternal depressive symptoms predicts offspring emotional and behavioral symptoms: a 9‑years longitudinal study L. Cerniglia1, F. Dentale2, R. Tambelli2, L. Murray3, P. Cooper3 and S. Cimino2*
Abstract Background: Maternal sub-threshold and non-clinical depression and its possible outcomes on offspring internalizing/externalizing symptoms has received growing attention in recent years because of its significant worldwide prevalence. Methods: Through a Latent State-Trait Analysis approach (LST), this longitudinal study aimed to identify a stable component of non-clinical maternal depression across a temporal interval of 6 years (measured through the Symptom Check-List-90/R) and to determine the effect of this component on children’s emotional and behavioral functioning (measured through the Child Behaviour Check-List) at age 12 years. Results: LST analysis showed that maternal depressive symptoms tended to remain stable within individuals across 6 years of observation strongly contributing to children’s internalizing/externalizing and dysregulation symptoms. Conclusions: The current longitudinal analysis of maternal and child data revealed that a stable component of maternal depressive symptoms reliably predicted a wide range of child emotional and behavioral symptoms at 12 years of age. Keywords: Maternal depression, LST, Children’s internalizing/externalizing, Dysregulation symptoms Background Clinical depression is a major contributor to the disease burden worldwide and constitutes a significant economic burden for communities [1], with a life-time prevalence between 20 and 25% in women and 7–12% in men [2–4]. Although historically psychiatric nosology has regarded major depression as a distinctive disorder [5, 6], more recent research has indicated that depression should be conceptualized as existing on a continuum [7]. Indeed,
*Correspondence: [email protected] 2 Department of Clinical and Dynamic Psychology, Sapienza, University of Rome, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00186 Rome, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
sub-threshold and non-clinical depression has received growing attention in recent years because of its significant prevalence (population studies have showed rates ranging from 1.4 to 17.2%) [8]. Although literature demonstrated that emotional and behavioral problems in children are predicted by several risk factors (e.g. child biology, child cognitive functioning, family context, school context) [9], depression in mothers has attracted considerable research and clinical attention over recent decades, largely because of evidence of its adverse effect on the mother–child relationship and child developmental outcome [10, 11]. However, most of this evidence comes from studies of mothers with a psychiatric diagnosis of depressive disorder, particularly
© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, ad
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