This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Psychiatry  • Depression  • Women's Health  • Diagnosis  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The article by Dr Weissman and colleagues¹ demonstrated that remission of maternal depression after treatment was correlated with reduction in children's psychiatric diagnoses and treatment. The authors plausibly conclude that this suggests an effect of the maternal disorder on the child, but in their "Comment" section, they recognize that they have not demonstrated causality and that reverse causality or an unknown common cause are also possible. They give as an example a contemporary environmental event, reduction in levels of stress.

Another possibility could be a prior common cause. Failure to improve with treatment would then be a marker for severity in the mother that is also reflected in increased severity in the child, because of either genetic or earlier environmental causes. The mother's improvement would not be a cause of the child's improvement but rather a predictor of the child also having a less severe course. Although . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Robert Michels, MD
Department of Psychiatry
rmichels@med.cornell.edu
Weill Medical College of Cornell University
New York, NY

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Remission of Maternal Depression and Children’s Psychopathology
Guilherme Polanczyk and Luis Augusto Rohde
JAMA. 2006;296(10):1232-1233.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Remission of Maternal Depression and Children’s Psychopathology
Stefan P. Kruszewksi, Kristopher S. Shumway, and Barry X. Kuhle
JAMA. 2006;296(10):1233.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Remission of Maternal Depression and Children’s Psychopathology—Reply
Myrna M. Weissman, Jonathan E. Alpert, Maurizio Fava, Madhukar H. Trivedi, and A. John Rush
JAMA. 2006;296(10):1233-1234.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Remissions in Maternal Depression and Child Psychopathology: A STAR*D-Child Report
Myrna M. Weissman, Daniel J. Pilowsky, Priya J. Wickramaratne, Ardesheer Talati, Stephen R. Wisniewski, Maurizio Fava, Carroll W. Hughes, Judy Garber, Erin Malloy, Cheryl A. King, Gabrielle Cerda, A. Bela Sood, Jonathan E. Alpert, Madhukar H. Trivedi, A. John Rush, and for the STAR*D-Child Team
JAMA. 2006;295(12):1389-1398.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT