Kudos to Dr. Mila Kingsbury, and her lab co-authors Murray Weeks, Nathalie MacKinnon, Jennifer Dykxhoorn, and Ian Colman, for their recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) on prenatal stress and offspring depression. This paper used data from the ALSPAC cohort, and included data from more than 10,000 mother-child pairs who had been followed prospectively since the children were in the womb in 1991-92. The paper showed a dose-response relationship between prenatal maternal stress and offspring depression at age 18, even after accounting for maternal depression and anxiety and a host of other covariates.The paper was accompanied by an editorial in JAACAP by esteemed researcher Andre Sourander, which highlighted the importance of better understanding the influence of early-life stress.
