Patterns of risk exposure in first 1,000 days of life and health, behavior, and education-related problems at age 4.5: evidence from Growing Up in New Zealand, a longitudinal cohort study

Early childhood development monitoring during the first thousand days: Investigating the relationship between the developmental surveillance instrument and standardized scales

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the Developmental Surveillance Instrument -Instrumento de Vigilância do Desenvolvimento (IVD), found in the Child's Booklet Caderneta da Crianca (CC), and standardized scales: Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS) and Denver Developmental Screening Test (Denver-II).

METHODS

Employing an exploratory observational approach, we adopted a prospective longitudinal design with a quantitative approach. The convenience sample included 83 Brazilian children born between May and August 2019 in a public hospital. Of the total, 45 (54.22 %) were male, and 38 (45.78 %) were female. Developmental screening utilized the IVD, AIMS and Denver-II tests. Comparative analysis between groups employed Mann-Whitney or Kruskal-Wallis tests for numerical variables and chi-square/Fisher tests for categorical variables, with a significance level of 5 % (p < 0.05).

RESULTS

A significant correlation was observed between the IVD and the AIMS and Denver-II tests (p < 0.001) at months 1, 4, and 8.

CONCLUSION

The presence of a robust correlation between the IVD and the AIMS and Denver-II tests at months 1, 4, and 8 implies that the IVD in the Child's Booklet serves as a reliable and effective indicator for screening infant development during this critical period. Detecting issues early through these methods is crucial to ensure the well-being of children, allowing for appropriate interventions as needed.

Fostering Resilience Among Mothers Early (FRAME): using growth mixture modeling to identify resources that mitigate perinatal depression

The primary objective of this study was to delineate classes of individuals based on depression trajectories from the antenatal period through 54-month postpartum and internal and external resources that are associated with low depression risk. Participants came from the Growing Up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) study (n = 5664), which is a pregnancy cohort study and is nationally representative of the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of contemporary New Zealand births. Growth curve mixture modeling was used to identify distinct subgroups based on depression scores from the antenatal period through 54-month postpartum. Logistic regression models were run to investigate socioeconomic factors and internal and external resources that were associated with depression class membership. A two-class model, "low risk" and "high risk," resulted in the best model fit. Most of the sample (n = 5110, 90%) fell into the "low-risk" class defined by no-to-mild depression symptoms during pregnancy and decreasing depressive symptoms over time (b_intercept =  - .05, b_slope =  - .05). Approximately 10% of the sample fell into the "high-risk" class (n = 554, 10%) defined by mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms during pregnancy and increasing depressive symptomology over time (b_intercept = .39, b_slope = .57). More positive parenting-related attitudes, better pre-pregnancy self-reported health, informal social supports, and community belonging were significantly associated with greater odds of being in the "low-risk" class, after controlling for socioeconomic factors. These findings suggest that targeting internal and external resources for individuals across the perinatal and early childhood periods is important to mitigating maternal depression.