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Weissman et al1 reported the consequences of a depressed parent for the offspring. Their conclusion was that the offspring of depressed parents are a high-risk group for onset of anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder in childhood, major depressive disorder in adolescence, and alcohol dependence in adolescence and early adulthood. The authors stated that there has not previously been a follow-up study of the offspring of depressed parents into adulthood that obtained estimates of risk for mental disorders.
We have an ongoing prospective follow-up study of an unselected birth cohort.2 During pregnancy, mothers of 12058 infants born in 1966 in northern Finland were asked by a nurse at the antenatal clinic if they felt themselves to be depressed. Of the mothers, 14% felt themselves to be depressed or very depressed at midgestation. The psychiatric morbidity of the offspring has been followed up from the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register. Between the years 1983 and 1994, a total of 387 subjects had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The case records of all registered patients were rechecked against clinical records by 2 senior researchers, who made the final DSM-III-R diagnoses.3
The prevalence of schizophrenia or psychotic disorders overall was not statistically significantly associated with maternal depression. Instead, the prevalence of nonpsychotic hospital-treated psychiatric disorders was more prevalent in offspring of depressed mothers (3.1%) than in offspring of the nondepressed mothers (2.0%) (P<.01). This is a finding similar to those of Weissman et al. Our results differ from Weissman and coworkers' results in that mothers' depression did not predict substance abuse or depression, but did predict severe hospital-treated personality disorders.
Country-Specific Mortality and Growth Failure in Infancy and Yound Children and Association With Material Stature
Use interactive graphics and maps to view and sort country-specific infant and early dhildhood mortality and growth failure data and their association with maternal
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