Differences in study design (prospective and retrospective), patient
populations (patients recruited from mental health settings and
General Hospital Psychiatry 36 (2014) 13–18
☆ Funding/Support: The research was supported by the following grant from the
Health Services Division of NIMH: T32 MH20021-14 (principal investigator: Wayne
Katon, MD).
☆☆ Conflict of interest notification: Drs. Huang, Coleman, Bridge, and Katon have no
potential conflicts of interest to disclose. Dr. Yonkers discloses royalties from Up-To-Date.
★ Additional contributions: We thank KeriLee Horan for her thoughtful review of the
manuscript, for which no compensation was received.
⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 617 575 5772; fax: +1 617 665 2521.
E-mail address: hhuang@cha.harvard.edu (H. Huang).
0163-8343 © 2014 Elsevier Inc.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2013.08.002
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
General Hospital Psychiatry
journal homepage: http://www.ghpjournal.com
Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
patients identified from registries), comparator groups (nondepressed
or depressed controls) and sample sizes make it difficult to
interpret the variability of findings. Many studies are also limited in
their ability to adequately control for important potential confounding
variables such as smoking, substance abuse, medical conditions
(such as pregnancy-induced hypertension and gestation diabetes)
and depression severity — all of which have been found to be
independently associated with adverse birth outcomes [10,11]