Psychological distress and mother-child relationship: influence of life context on a population sample (BRISA) through the use of directed acyclic graphs (DAG)

• Autor(a) principal: Cavalcante,M.C.V.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Lamy,Z.C., França,A.K.T.C., Pereira,M.U.L., Ferraro,A.A., Barbieri,M.A., Lamy-Filho,F.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-879X2021000100607
• topic: Mental suffering; Mother-infant interaction; Mother-child relations; Association; Psychosocial impact

This study aimed to investigate the association between maternal psychological distress and impairment in mother-child relationship in a sample from a Northeast capital city in Brazil with a low Human Development Index, using directed acyclic graphs (DAG). A total of 3,215 women were evaluated for the presence of psychological distress through the Self Reporting Questionnaire instrument and for the mother-child relationship by the first factor of Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire, considered the most appropriate in the literature. Demographic and socioeconomic variables were used to construct a theoretical model and, after this, multivariate logistic regression was performed using variables suggested by Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). Psychological distress was present in 22.7% of the women and 12.6% of them presented impaired mother-child relationships. After adjustment, the variable ‘maternal mental distress' remained associated with impaired mother-child relationship (RR=3.03), and among the explanatory variables only ‘primary school level' (RR=1.48) was associated as a risk factor to this outcome. The results indicated that, in this population, women with psychological distress and lower schooling are more likely to present impaired mother-child relationships.