Babies Placed in Incubators Decrease Risk of Depression as Adults

Babies Placed in Incubators Decrease Risk of Depression as Adults

  • Submitted By: 06041988
  • Date Submitted: 11/23/2008 10:02 PM
  • Category: Science
  • Words: 826
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 950

In this article, what researchers are saying, is that babies who received incubator care after birth were less likely to experience depression as adults. The research method that was used in this particular article is called Correlational Method; where they make measurements to discover relationships between events. This discovery was made by scientists from the Université de Montréal and Sainte Justine Hospital Research Centre along with researchers from the McGill University, the Douglas Hospital Research Center and the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in the U.K. When the researchers first began their study, their hypothesis was that because of mother-baby separation due to incubator care, it would then higher depression in adults but instead they found the opposite. The researchers found that because babies were place in incubators it decreased depression by two to three times in adulthood. As they got into more depth with the study, they also found that girls were three times less likely to experience depression by the age of 15 if they had received incubator care at birth.

The way this study took place, is that the team of researchers studied a sub sample of 1212 children recruited from a longitudinal study that began in 1986. Children were also recruited from Quebec kindergartens and facts about their birth conditions, and any complications and incubator care were retrieved through hospital medical records. These participants then received a series of psychiatric assessments when they were 15 and 21 years of age. With these studies done, the researchers found that of the 16.5 percent of babies placed in incubators only 5 percent suffered of major depression by the age of 21. For the participants that were not placed in incubators as babies, 9 percent developed depression, which comes to be the average rate for society in general. The relationship between depression and incubator care remained the same even after analyzing different factors...

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