Karen Amaral Tavares Pinheiro - Universidade Católica de Pelotas

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After controlling for possible confounding variables, we observed that severity of
maternal depression had a significant impact in children’s outcome. As shown in Table 1, the
risk of sleep problems for those children whose mothers presented new onset severe
depression at 12 months [2.20; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.19-4.35] was higher than
observed among mild depressed mother’s offspring (1.57; 95% CI: 0.48-5.13). When
chronicity was taken into account, we observed an additional risk of 2.20 (95% CI: 0.62-7.86)
for mild chronic depressed mother, and even higher (2.58; 95% CI: 1.15-5.63) for chronic
severe cases. Moreover, a linear trend could be observed toward a higher risk of sleep
problems as severity and chronicity of mother’s depressive symptoms increases (p=0.05).
4. Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the impact the severity and
chronocity of maternal depression over the child’s sleep in a developing country.
We have detected that as severity and chronocity of maternal depressive symptoms
increases, sleep problems in the child at 12 months of the life increases, even after contolling
for possible confounders. This find is consistent with previous reports regarding behavioral
and cognitive outcomes (Brennan et al., 2000), suggesting that long-lasting and severe
maternal depressive symptoms could play important role in the development of sleep
disorders in the infants (Warren, Howe, Simmens e Dahl, 2006). Of interest, we found no
association between infant sleep problems and maternal mood-related sleep disturbance,
which points toward the possible relevance of other features than maternal sleep in mediating
the association of maternal depression and infant sleep problems. This find is in contrast to a
recent pilot study (Meltzer e Mindell, 2007), although dissimilarities of instruments used to
evaluated sleep problems could account for the diverse results.