Thinking Healthy Program Peer Delivered Plus (THPP+)

Every year millions of children begin a compromised developmental trajectory resulting from exposure to maternal depression. In recent years, compelling evidence that maternal depression leads to worse developmental outcomes in the child has prompted a dramatic increase in efforts to ameliorate it. However, empirical evidence linking depression treatment to improved developmental trajectories in offspring is far from robust. The evidence is lacking due to several methodological limitations of previous studies, namely, insufficient follow-up, lack of appropriate control group, and/or lack of attention to the psychological and behavioral mechanisms underlying the impact of interventions on both the mother and child.

We propose an innovative, cost-effective extension to an NIMH-funded perinatal depression cluster randomized controlled intervention trial (RCT) in Pakistan (SHARE: U19MH095687). The SHARE RCT includes individual and community-wide components and follows mothers with prenatal depression until 6 months postpartum. Our proposal, SHARE CHILD, builds on this trial in several critical ways. We (1) focus on child outcomes, (2) extend follow-up to 36 months postpartum, (3) include mothers who did not screen positive for depression in the 3rd trimester, thus enabling additional comparisons, and (4) investigate factors that mediate and modify the effect of the intervention on child outcomes. A unique window of opportunity is made possible due to the anticipated spring 2014 enrollment start date of the SHARE trial.

Our long-term goal is to identify key modifiable factors in the intergenerational transmission of risk from depressed mothers to their children. The overall objective of this proposal is to rigorously evaluate the impact of a community based perinatal depression intervention on child development by expanding the sample of an already funded RCT and extending the follow-up period to 36 months postpartum. Our central hypothesis is that the perinatal depression intervention will lead to improved child socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical outcomes. Including the non-depressed dyads in our analyses will enable us to further determine (a) how much of the excess risk due to maternal depression exposure the intervention can mitigate and (b) whether this community based intervention has an impact on all children living in the intervention clusters, even if their mothers were not depressed prenatally. Such insights would not otherwise be possible without this expanded sample given the dearth of information on child developmental norms in this setting. Together, the unique opportunity to extend the SHARE trial to the broader SHARE CHILD study and the approaches we propose will yield novel and definitive evidence of the impact of treating perinatal depression on child developmental outcomes.