Understanding, predicting, and treating depression in pregnancy to improve mothers’ and offspring’s mental health outcomes: The HappyMums Study

Perinatal depression is common: on average, more than 13% of women suffer from physician-diagnosed disorder and 20% report symptoms bearing clinical relevance. Maternal depression not only significantly impacts women's quality of life but also increases the offspring's risk of negative developmental outcomes, including mental disorders, through a combination of maternal alterations in in-utero biology and postnatal rearing factors during the early period of life. The HappyMums project aims to improve our understanding of perinatal depression by identifying the factors that robustly predict risk and resilience in mothers and their offspring, determining underlying neurobiological mechanisms, and, finally, testing the efficacy of potential interventions. HappyMums will use data from a large collection of cohorts and registries containing biological, clinical, socio-demographic, environmental, and lifestyle data. It will pool unique human samples of maternal blood, placenta, chorionic villi and amniotic fluid, analyzing these data alongside pre-clinical samples of brain, blood and placental tissue from models of prenatal stress in mice and livebearing fish for correlative analyses. HappyMums will develop a mobile application (App) to collect multiple data types from women for early screening and monitoring of depressive symptoms. The findings generated by HappyMums will be clinically relevant as they will increase the knowledge on perinatal depression, with unprecedented benefits for the offspring and the society as a whole.