Progress & Action Plan

Cheryl, Yasmin and I meet every Wednesday morning to talk about the progress of the projects, exchange ideas, and assign "homework." I love these meetings because they make me feel productive, with tangible outcomes. Last week we picked through the first draft of our PPD questionnaire (QQ) and came up with lots of points to check on (e.g. maternity leave, religion, race in China). Today I made a list of questions about the QQ to be sent to Beijing for clarification and addition to the QQ.

From now until departure, our action plan is to revise the QQ for both studies (my depression and Yasmin's optimism, heheh). Translate QQ into Chinese. Make clinical abstraction forms. Think about our analysis plan. This is exciting!

Next week, data will be collected for the matching U.S. cohort of the optimism study. I'll help collect data at the UM hospital to see how things work in English first, before getting dumped into Chinese.

Study Objectives

My research topic of interest this summer is postpartum depression in Chinese women. There has been some recent work done in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but surprisingly little in mainland China. The paucity of literature makes this basic prevalence study quite exciting. We will also investigate sociocultural risk factors and any protective factors against PPD that may exist in the Chinese culture.

From my background reading, it seems that depression is now considered to be a continuous, rather than a discrete, disease. Therefore, postpartum depression would not be a distinct disease classification, but rather, the conditions of the postpartum period would be triggers for a depressive episode. Indeed, the greatest risk factors for PPD are an individual or family history of depression and symptoms of depression/anxiety during pregnancy. Associated risk factors are race, financial stress, and low self-esteem.

A big protective risk factor is the presence of social support, and I hope to explore that within the lens of the Chinese postpartum practice of zuoyue (Mandarin) or peiyue (Cantonese). I am personally interested in studying the risk factors of financial stress (wealth gaps in China highly noted after economic liberalization), ethnic origin (parellel to the American risk factor of race), and effects of the one-child social policy on individual family planning and mental health. The last, of course, will be impossible to study rigorously in the current research plan, but we may find associations, for example, with history of abortion and expectations for the baby's gender. (Link for more modern China propaganda posters)

IRB Snafoo

Today was the goal for submitting our PPD protocol in for IRB approval, but I've learned from Cheryl's email today that we have struck an obstacle. In these international collaborations, it seems that we need IRB approval first from the host institution, in this case Beijing University, before we can process IRB approval at UM. Darn it! So Cheryl's trying to get all the info to the other side as quickly as possible. Oh, I hope it goes through!!

Note: IRB stands for Institutional Review Board, and it must approve any research projects involving human subjects research to ensure that certain ethical guidelines are being followed.