When a Mom Feels Depressed, Her Baby's Cells Might Feel It, Too

Julia Pabafikos

Mr. Ippolito

AP Biology

March 8, 2018

Nelson, Benjamin W. “When a Mom Feels Depressed, Her Baby's Cells Might Feel It, Too.” Scientific American, 23 Jan. 2018, www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-a-mom-feels-depressed-her-babys-cells-might-feel-it-too/.

“When a Mom Feels Depressed, Her Baby's Cells Might Feel It, Too” By: Benjamin W. Welson

The article I decided to read, “When a Mom Feels Depressed, Her Baby's Cells Might Feel It, Too” by Benjamin W. Welson touches upon how early relationships between mothers and their infants can influence the health across the lifespan, for better or for worse. The experiment looked upon telomeres in order to fully understand the effects of a mother’s depression on her infant. Telomeres are caps at the end of our DNA that protect chromosomes. The length of telomeres is affected by our genetics and age and as telomeres shorten over time, people are more likely to experience a host of negative health outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity and even death. Telomeres can also shorten quicker if a person suffers from psychological stress. Nelson states “our bodies release a hormone called cortisol, which influences our emotional responses as well as our energy metabolism, learning and memory. This may be one mechanism that connects psychological stress to telomere length.” Throughout the article it is made evident that infancy is a very sensitive period and the infant is strongly influenced by its environment. In order to study how early stress may influence a person’s health, researches looked into how infants respond to their parents’ stress.  Studies suggest that infants exposed to maternal depression may be less likely to engage socially and experience more negative emotion. For the experiment, researchers recruited 48 mothers with 12-week-old infants and followed these families until the infants were 18 months old. At 6 and 12 months of age, the infants were brought to the lab to engage in stressful tasks. Infants stress was calculated by collecting saliva samples to look at changes in cortisol and then when infants were 18 months of age researchers collected saliva to measure the length of the infant’s telomeres. Nelson explains “Worsening depression symptoms in mothers related to greater infant cortisol stress responses between 6 and 12 months of age. In addition, infants with higher cortisol stress responses were more likely to have shorter telomeres at 18 months of age.” However, there is a silver lining to the story, which is that having positive experiences when an infant allow for a healthier life.

This article is relevant to society in that there is an alarming statistic of women that have postpartum depression along with women who can not afford the proper treatment to deal with their depression or any other maternal mental health treatment. With the knowledge of telomeres and different hormones that are released in our brains, researchers can further their experiments in order to help cure and prevent  these detrimental effects on infants.

This article was both informative and very easy to understand. Author Benjamin Nelson did an amazing job stating the experiments and giving background information in order to attract his reader. By doing so, Nelson was able to make the article more reliable and less biased in order to give the reader the opportunity to formulate their own opinions. However I believe that Nelson lacked quotes from the actual scientists and therefore without this information the article became less scientific. I believe with the addition of more quotes and the addition of other experiments previously tested to describe the effects of depression would have made a bigger effect on the reader and overall would have shown the importance of this experiment.