Maternal depression during pregnancy and child neurodevelopment and mental health outcomes.

Previous studies have reported effects of prenatal maternal depression on behavioural outcomes in offspring (for a review, see Aoyagi et al., 2019). However, many of these studies report mixed results. In this project, we aim to study the effects of prenatal maternal depression on children’s long-term behavioural development and mental health, leveraging large-scale, multi-cohort data in the EU Child Cohort Network. As a secondary objective, we plan to disentangle the effects of lifetime, prenatal and postnatal depression on offspring development. The strength that comes with studying this research question in the LifeCycle cohort is the large amount of harmonised, multi-cohort data available, which allows us to investigate offspring outcomes over time while also controlling for relevant confounding factors. Furthermore, rather than focusing on a single behavioural outcome, our approach will be more comprehensive than previous studies by examining a range of measures including cognition, internalising and externalising behaviour, and ASD and ADHD. This can aid our understanding of symptom profiles for children prenatally exposed to maternal depression.