Role of Omega-3 Unsaturated Fatty Acids in the Postpartum Depression: Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis

Fatima Mougharbel and Raywat Deonandan

Global Journal of Health Science, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 304

Abstract: BACKGROUND- Postpartum depression (PPD) is a complex mental health disorder that affects women during their childbearing years. It is a serious medical condition that occurs in approximately 15% of women after birth and has an adverse effect on both the mother and the infant. Hypotheses exist relating dietary deficiencies in a pregnant or postnatal woman’s diet may cause postnatal depression. It is unclear whether Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) are effective for treating or preventing PPD.OBJECTIVES- To assess the best available evidence to date regarding the effect of n-3 PUFAs on the etiology, prevention and treatment of postnatal depression.METHODS- A systematic review and narrative synthesis was conducted in order to address the gaps in knowledge. For the systematic review, a broad search of electronic databases of published quantitative literature was conducted. The narrative synthesis consists of four elements- 1) developing a theory; 2) developing a preliminary synthesis; 3) exploring relationships in the data; 4) assessing the robustness of the synthesis. Published experimental and observational studies were accepted involving women who were pregnant or who had given birth in the previous six weeks. N-3 PUFAs was the intervention of interest and PPD was the outcome.RESULTS- Out of 181 potential articles, a total of 17 studies met the inclusion criteria. The overwhelming majority of the studies found that n-3 PUFAs had no inverse association with PPD evaluations. Significant heterogeneity was observed among included studies.CONCLUSIONS- Overall, This systematic review and narrative synthesis failed to find a significant positive association between n-3 PUFAs intake and PPD.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/download/58922/33290 (application/pdf)
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/view/58922 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibn:gjhsjl:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:304

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Global Journal of Health Science from Canadian Center of Science and Education Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Canadian Center of Science and Education ().