Predicting Perinatal Depression: The Future of Maternal Mental Health, a conversation with Dr. Sheila Shanmugan

Perinatal mood disorders represent one of the most common complications of pregnancy--1 in 5 women will experience this during or after their pregnancy; a sizeable fraction of these women experienced some kind of mood disorder prior to pregnancy--but currently it's hard to predict how pregnancy will mix with this history. My guest today shares with us what the future of pregnancy could look like; using advanced scanning technology, we may be able offer a much more accurate estimate of the chances of experiencing depression in pregnancy based on a look at a mom's brain structure​.You can find Towards Personalized Clinical Interventions for Perinatal Depression: Leveraging Precision Functional Mapping here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt8104You can find Dr. Sheila Shanmugan's (MD, PhD) work here, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania: https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p8364165 Charles (Chuck) Lynch et al 2024 Nature paper on mapping depression: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11410656/#Abs1Dr. Laura Pritschet's episode on the show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-not-mommy-brain-how-hormones-during-pregnancy-prepare/id1779600854?i=1000679984230