Depression, Suicide and Fetal Fates

By Ian Gotlib (chair of Stanford Psychology Dept) at the BrainMind Symposium this weekend:

“Adolescence is a period of suicide risk, and it’s getting worse. The biggest risk factor are 1) family history 2) being female

There are 200 million depressed mothers with daughters who have not become depressed yet. She studied those daughters. They have a big change from other similar aged girls. Smaller hippocampus. Shorter telomeres already by age 12. When they check in 10 years later, 60% of those girls became depressed.

(The CDC recently came to Palo Alto to look at what’s going on in this suicide cluster.)

By age 9-14, it might be too late already.” So, they did infant studies and various measures of the pregnant mothers (measuring continuous cortical level from hair samples during pregnancy). Prenatal stress lowers hippocampal volume and amygdala connectivity.

And they gathered a lot of passive data. The infant’s brain volume correlates with number of words heard in utero.

And they were disturbed to see the strong correlation with income level (below).