COPENHAGEN – Tiina Paunio, MD, PhD, reported at the annual congress of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Dr. Tiina Paunio
“I think it is very important to understand that we need to screen pregnant women for sleep problems, even those without a history of depression, so we can have early treatment of insomnia – and also depression – because postnatal maternal depression is very much a risk for the child during a vulnerable period for development,” said Dr. Paunio, professor of psychiatry at the University of Helsinki.
She was a coinvestigator in a prospective study of the Finnish CHILD-SLEEP longitudinal birth cohort in which 1,398 women completed the Basic Nordic Sleep Questionnaire and the 10-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) at about gestational week 32 and again around 3 months following delivery. Postnatal depressiveness as defined by a CES-D score of at least 10 points was present in 10.3% of the mothers. After adjusting for prenatal depressiveness and other potential confounders, the investigators found that tiredness during the day, poor general sleep quality, getting less than 6 hours of sleep, taking longer than 20 minutes to fall asleep, and sleep loss of 2 hours or more per night during pregnancy were each associated with clinically significant postnatal depressive symptoms, with odds ratios of 1.87-2.19.
The full details of the study have been published (Arch Womens Ment Health. 2019 Jun;22[3]:327-37).
The impetus for this study of sleep problems in pregnancy as a predictor of postnatal depressive symptoms was a body of evidence linking insomnia to depression in both men and women. But it turns out that insomnia is a significant predictor of later onset of a wide variety of psychiatric disorders, not only depression, as highlighted in a recent systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by an international team of investigators, Dr. Paunio observed.
Baseline insomnia symptoms were associated with a 183% increased risk of later onset of depression, a 223% increased risk of anxiety, a 35%greater risk of alcohol abuse, and a 28% increased risk of psychosis. However, the insomnia/psychosis link must be viewed as tentative, as it was examined in only a single published study. The investigators rated the overall risk of bias in the studies included in their meta-analysis as moderate (Sleep Med Rev. 2019 Feb;43:96-105).
For Dr. Paunio, these findings suggest that interventional studies of early and effective treatment of insomnia as a potential means of preventing psychiatric disorders are in order.
She reported receiving research funding from the Academy of Finland, the Gyllenberg Foundation, and Finska Lakaresallskapet.