Grant: Project Grant

While a large body of research suggests that inflammation and depression are closely related, there is an urgent need to refine our understanding of this association if more targeted interventions are to be developed. One methodological issue that has limited progress in this area is that most studies have been done in adult populations with various co-morbidities and complexities. As a result, the inflammatory changes reported in many studies could relate more to chronic stress, medical co-morbidities and long term medication exposures than to depressive pathology per se. To address this, our research group is exploring possible links between maternal inflammation in pregnancy and depressive symptoms in young children in a prospective birth cohort called the Ontario Birth Study. Initial pilot data are highly promising, including significant associations between a key maternal inflammatory marker in pregnancy (C-reactive protein) and both the presence of sad mood and lack of positive mood in the respective children assessed at age 4 years. The specific findings are dependent on when in pregnancy the maternal samples are collected, and on the sex of the child. The current proposal is to extend this initial work into a much larger sample of mother-child dyads, and to extend the follow-up period for the participating children into later childhood. If successful, this work will shed significant new light on how inflammatory processes change brain circuitry in general, and in early life in particular. This in turn will inform the design and implementation of more targeted preventative strategies for a disorder that is now the single greatest contributor to disability across the lifespan worldwide.