Archives of Women's Mental Health - Editor's Pick - journal highlights (Autumn 2023)
Archives of Women's Mental Health publishes the latest research and review articles on current topics in a wide range of specialty areas. Here are some of latest journal highlights handpicked by the Editor-in-Chief Anita Riecher-Rössler.
Personality and gender prototypes for predicting health (this opens in a new tab)
Published 03 November 2023
Sara Esteban-Gonzalo, Juan Carlos Fernández-Gonzalo, Juan Luis González-Pascual, Carmen Bouzas-Mosquera & Laura Esteban-Gonzalo
Prior studies have identified that mentally healthy people tend to share common characteristics and common ways of coping with stressful life events.
These authors assessed personality factors, gender roles and mental health in 795 university students in Madrid and Toledo during 2019.
They found that students with better mental health share a series of personality and gender-related traits that provide them with better tools for coping with the challenges they face.
The best mental health was identified in androgynous individuals with high scores in both masculinity and femininity, as well as high scores in extraversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Incidence of postpartum depression in low-income cannabis users with and without a history of depression (this opens in a new tab)
Published 01 November 2023
Anastasia Lendel, Ria Richards, Jason Benedict, Courtney Lynch & Jonathan Schaffir
These authors aimed to better understand the association between cannabis use during pregnancy and postpartum depression in women with and without a history of depression. This was a retrospective cohort study of patients who received prenatal care at a single institution between January 2017 and December 2019.
Prenatal cannabis use was associated with screening positive for postpartum depression, particularly in those women with a history of depression. These results should discourage women with depression from self-medicating with cannabis in pregnancy and provide additional support to the existing recommendations to abstain from prenatal cannabis use.
Postmarketing safety profile of brexanolone: a pharmacovigilance analysis based on FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) (this opens in a new tab)
Published: 13 October 2023
Meilian Zhang, Wenhuo Xie, Jianbin Li, Jiaping Zheng & Yu Zhou
Brexanolone (Zulresso®) that was approved for the USA in March 2019 is indicated for the treatment of postpartum depression, but information on adverse drug reactions associated with its use is still limited. The main aim of this study therefore was to explore the postmarketing safety profile of brexanolone.
This pharmacovigilance study was based on the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System. It showed a high reporting frequency of psychiatric and nervous system adverse drug reactions associated with the use of brexanolone. As the authors demand, these signals urgently need to be clarified.
The long-term course and prognosis of postpartum depression: a retrospective longitudinal cohort study (this opens in a new tab)
Published: 26 September 2023
Miki Bloch, Michal Tevet, Roy Onn, Inbar Fried-Zaig & Gabi Aisenberg-Romano
In this retrospective longitudinal cohort study, mothers diagnosed as either suffering from postpartum depression (PPD) or without postpartum depression were assessed.
Two thirds of mothers with postpartum depression had any psychiatric disorder before their postpartum depression, compared with only 9% in the group without postpartum depression. Throughout the 5 years subsequent to the postpartum depression, 43% of the PPD group compared with only 4% for the non-PPD group developed a new episode of depression.
Clinicians treating females for PPD should therefore consider a longer treatment continuation phase and a closer follow-up program to prevent further suffering.
Impact of parental status on US medical student specialty selection (this opens in a new tab)
Published: 26 August 2023
Georgia Mae Morrison, Bianca L. Di Cocco, Rebecca Goldberg, Audrey H. Calderwood, Allison R. Schulman, Brintha Enestvedt & Jessica X. Yu
Medical training occurs during peak childbearing years for most medical students. Many factors influence specialty selection. The aims of this study were to determine whether parents are more drawn to family-friendly specialties than non-parents. The authors performed a multicenter web-based survey. A total of 537 out of 2236 (24.0%) students responded.
Specialties rated most family-friendly included family medicine, dermatology, pediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, emergency medicine, and pathology. Passion for the field, culture of the specialty, and quality of life were the top three factors students considered when choosing a specialty. Being a parent or future parent ranked more highly for parents than non-parents.
As the authors conclude, medical school training and simultaneous parenting is daunting and physicians in training should be better supported.