Diet and Post-Partum Mental Health (Maternal Diet and Child Development)

The objective of this 2021 review was to find the link between nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy and lactation, with maternal depression. Inadequate nutrition and depression are often seen among pregnant and lactating women in middle- and low-income countries, which implies there is a connection between the two. Madeghe et al. therefore searched through the PubMed databases and Google Scholar search engine to scour the literature on this subject. After screening 1250 relevant articles, we were left with 25 studies that met the inclusion criteria. Among these were cross-sectional (13), prospective cohort (8), and intervention (4) studies. Most of these studies (95%) showed positive associations between nutrition deficiencies, poor diet, and maternal depression. In other words, only 5% of the papers did not find correlations between nutrition and maternal depression. These findings suggest that nutritional interventions show the most promise for modifying mental health illnesses. Most studies that did not identify interlinks between poor diet quality with poor maternal and offspring mental health outcomes were of cross-sectional design. Causal relationships cannot be exposed by cross-sectional studies, which is why more longitudinal studies are needed to confirm the nutrition-mental health associations.