Thaindian News

Washington, Nov 11 (IANS) A growing foetus is bombarded with messages from its mom — not just about heartbeats but also chemical signals, including those about the mother’s mental state, through the placenta.

A new study finds that if the mother is depressed, it affects how the baby develops after it is born.

In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a foetus is growing up in - the mother’s womb - is very important, the journal Psychological Science reports.

Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating. But others are subtler — people born during the Dutch famine of 1944, most of whom had starving mothers, were likely to have health problems like obesity and diabetes later.

Curt A. Sandman, Elysia P. Davis and Laura M. Glynn of the University of California, Irvine studied how the mother’s psychological state affects a developing foetus.

They recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after they gave birth. They also gave their babies tests after they were born to see how well they were developing, according to a university statement.

They found something interesting: what mattered to the babies was if the environment was consistent before and after birth.

That is, the babies who did best were those who either had mothers who were healthy both before and after giving birth, and those whose mothers were depressed before birth and stayed depressed afterward.

What slowed the babies’ development was changing conditions - a mother who went from depressed before birth to healthy after or healthy before birth to depressed after. “We must admit, the strength of this finding surprised us,” Sandman said.

“We know how to deal with depression,” he said. The problem is, women are rarely screened for depression before birth.

In the long term, having a depressed mother could lead to neurological problems and psychiatric disorders, Sandman said.