Trajectories of mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms from pregnancy to 24 months postpartum

Objectives: This study investigated trajectories of mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms from prenatal to 24 months postpartum. Prenatal correlates of the trajectories were also examined. Methods: Mothers (N = 1670) and fathers (N = 1604) from the Finnish CHILD-SLEEP birth cohort, reported depressive symptoms at 32nd pregnancy week and 3, 8, and 24 months postpartum using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D, 10-item). Profile analysis was used to group participants according to their longitudinal patterns of depressive symptoms. Prenatal predictors (sociodemographic, health, substance use, sleep, and stress related factors, family atmosphere) of depressive symptom trajectories as well as association between parents' trajectories were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Results: For both mothers and fathers, a solution with three stable depressive symptom trajectories (low: 63.1% mothers and 74.9% fathers; moderate: 28.1% and 22.6%; high: 8.8% and 2.6%) was considered the best fitting and most informative. Insomnia, earlier depression, anxiousness, stressfulness, and poor family atmosphere predicted the moderate and high (compared to low) depressive symptom trajectories among both mothers and fathers in multivariate analyses. Mother's higher depressive symptom trajectory was significantly associated with father's higher symptom trajectory (p < 0.001). Limitations: Number of cases in the high depressive symptom trajectory group among fathers was low. Conclusions: Maternal and paternal depressive symptom trajectories from prenatal period up to two years postpartum seem stable, indicating the chronic nature of perinatal depressive symptoms. Mothers' and fathers' trajectories are associated with each other and their strongest predictors are common to both.