Child asthma, mother's depression linked

BALTIMORE, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Maternal depression may aggravate a child's asthma but how often a child had symptoms did not seem to affect the mother's symptoms, U.S. researchers said.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore analyzed data from interviews with 262 mothers of African-American children with asthma -- a population disproportionately affected by the inflammatory airway disorder.

The study, in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, found children whose mothers had more depressive symptoms had more frequent asthma symptoms during the six-month study. Conversely, children whose mothers reported fewer depressive symptoms had less frequent asthma symptoms.

Senior investigator Kristin Riekert, a pediatric psychologist and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Adherence Research Center, and colleagues tracked ups and downs in maternal depression as related to the frequency of symptoms among children.

"Even though our research was not set up to measure just how much a mom's depression increased the frequency of her child's symptoms, a clear pattern emerged in which the latter followed the earlier," Riekert said in a statement.

"Intuitively, it may seem that we're dealing with a chicken-egg situation, but our study suggests otherwise. The fact that mom's depression was not affected by how often her child had symptoms really caught us off guard, but it also suggested which factor comes first."