Reduced gestational age associated with an increased likelihood of depression in later life

everal studies have shown that individuals born with a lower birth weight have an increased risk of depression as adults. Birth weight reflects not just fetal growth but also length of gestation, yet there has been little evidence to date on the effect of gestational length on susceptibility to depression. Raikkonen and colleagues addressed this gap by measuring depressive symptoms in a cohort of men and women aged around 61 for whom birth records were available; they restricted the sample to term births, thus avoiding the potential problem of confounding due to prematurity or postmaturity. They found that depressive symptoms increased with shorter gestational length, independent of birth weight. Although there was no association over the whole range of birth weight and later risk of depression, those born with a low birth weight (<2.5 kg) were more likely to have depressive symptoms in later life, a finding consistent with earlier research