Partners and children’s genes influence mother’s depression

Motherhood is a period of increased stress and uncertainty which carries an elevated risk of maternal depression.

Decades of social support theory points to a role of partners and children in mother’s mental health during the childbearing years but only recently were methods developed to unpack the mechanisms behind this.

A polygenic score serves as a count of the number of genes a person has, that have been previously associated with a trait. It’s as simple as this: high polygenic score = high genetic propensity for the trait, low polygenic score = low genetic propensity for the trait.

Postdoctoral Fellow Ziada Ayorech at the PROMENTA Research Center calculated polygenic scores for up to 25, 000 mothers, fathers and children participating in the Norwegian Mother Father and Child study (MoBa) and used them to predict mother’s symptoms of depression during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood.

She expected to find that mother’s genes influence their own depression – decades of twin studies have demonstrated this.

But what is novel is that she found father’s and child’s genes also influenced mother’s depression and this effect is present during pregnancy, infancy and even up to 8 year’s after birth. 

Having a partner or child with a higher genetic burden for mental health problems predicted women’s depression above and beyond women’s owns genes.

These results have implications for how we support depressed mothers suggesting for example, reducing father’s depression can have direct implications on women’s mental health. Our findings indicate that maternal depression is a family-wide problem requiring family-wide solutions.