Heart disease and heart ache

It’s no surprise that mothers of children born with congenital heart defects suffer terribly through the emotional challenges which come with nursing their children back to health. What is surprising is that the depression and anxiety hangs on longer than the child’s medical condition.

“Having a baby with a heart defect can be a chock. In the most severe cases, surgery must be performed immediately after birth as well as several times more during the child’s first year of life,” explains Oivind Solberg, a doctoral fellow in psychology at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo where this new study has begun.

About 10% of all new mothers experience depression after childbirth. They wanted to know how the depression of mothers who had very ill newborns compared, qualitatively and quantitatively, with that general statistic.

The good news is that mothers with only mildly or moderately ill babies do not different significantly from any other new mother in the study.

However, for mothers with babies who have severe defects, they experience anxiety and depression for six to eighteen months after the birth. And often this exceeds the window of treatment for the baby.

“What is interesting is that the mothers still suffer from anxiety an depression once their children have reached the age of 18 months and most of the medical interventions are over,” said Margarete Vollrath, who heads up the project.

“The results show that saving these children on the operating table is only half the battle -- these children also need close follow-up afterwards. The same applies to several of the children’s mothers and the families in general,” said Solberg. Recommendations will be made as the study continues.

Source: The Research Council of Norway, ScienceDaily