Reacción a "Brain amygdala activity associated with a tendency to suffer depression in pregnant women, study finds"

This is a study of a very small sample of women, 15 of them pregnant in the second trimester, which seeks to test the relationship between amygdala activation in the brain with a lower capacity for emotional regulation and that this also implies a higher score on a scale of depressive symptoms in pregnancy, even if the patients did not have a clinical diagnosis of depression.

The study contains several questionable inferences, such as identifying the score on a scale in the second trimester of pregnancy with the risk of postpartum depression (the study does not reveal whether these pregnant women were depressed when they gave birth) or equating lower emotion regulation with a biological abnormality and a risk of postpartum depression.

There is no doubt about the hormonal changes that occur during pregnancy and after childbirth, but women's emotional states after childbirth are also conditioned by the increased demands of motherhood, expectations, the degree of support from the family and social environment and especially from the partner, economic and job security, and all the contextual elements surrounding this process. Attempting to predict the risk of postpartum depression by means of an imaging test that measures the activity of the cerebral amygdala is not only extremely limited, but also focuses on an alleged biological defect in the mother and contributes to obscuring all the environmental determinants.