Longitudinal Study of Diagnoses in Children of Women With Unipolar and Bipolar Affective Disorder

Psychopathology and Quality of Life in Children of Mentally Ill Parents

“…In respect to the characteristics of the parental illness, positive associations were found between the severity of the illness, parental anxiety and somatic complaints and children's psychopathology. This result is analogous to other studies showing that the severity of parental symptomatology goes along with increased psychopathology in the children (Brennan et al, 2000;Hammen, Burge, Burney & Adrian, 1990;Keller et al, 1986;Weissman et al, 2005). It is rather astonishing that, contrary to other studies (Mattejat et al, 2000), no association was found between depressive symptoms in parents and emotional and behavioral difficulties in the here examined population of children.…”

Maternal depression and child development

“…Hammen et al (40) followed a cohort of 92 children/adolescents between the ages of eight and 16 years over a three-year period. They found that children/adolescents with mothers suffering from unipolar depression had higher rates of affective disorders, with frequent multiple diagnoses, while the disorders in children/adolescents with mothers suffering from bipolar depression were less severe.…”

Challenges and developments in research of the early stages of bipolar disorder

“…For example, studies which included healthy children as controls demonstrated a major increase in a range of psychopathology in the OSBP, while studies using children of chronically medically ill parents (so-called positive controls) often show high levels of psychopathology in the comparison group as well as in the OSBP group. 51 Finally, the use of pediatric or adult diagnostic criteria to identify BD, and the use of dimensional rather than categorical measures of psychopathology, may influence study findings. 46 These issues are highly relevant to any comparisons of data regarding neurobiology of the stages of BD, as heterogeneity in OSBP clinical phenotypes or illness trajectories may obscure rather than clarify our understanding of clinicopathological boundaries across illness stages.…”