Dinner, Drinks, and … Due Dates – the birth of a successfully funded collaboration to address postpartum mood disorders

It started out innocently enough. Late in January, I got a text from my friend and colleague, Dr. Shari Steinman, asking if we could get together for dinner that night. Without even consulting my spouse, I agreed because I always love getting together with Shari and her family. Shari and I met through a mutual friend, Dr. Jill Savla, an absolutely brilliant badass pediatric cardiologist who was Shari’s roommate in college and who I have known since middle school. When Shari earned a faculty position at WVU, Jill connected us and implored us to be friends. It wasn’t a hard sell as we are both trained in Psychology, we both study mood disorders, we are both academic mamas, and we are both obsessed with Moana. That our spouses and kids get along too is just a silver lining to a beautiful friendship and a meeting of great minds.

Almost as soon as we sat down, I heard those famous last words, “No pressure to say yes but I have a great idea for how we can collaborate!”. There was a funding mechanism, the WVU Research and Scholarship Advancement program, and the application was due in 10 days. I already was juggling an R01 grant submission and preparing to serve as an Early Career Reviewer at an upcoming NIH study section and Shari had a thriving lab, courses to teach, and patients to see. But Shari and I had been looking for just such an opportunity to work together scientifically and also somewhat selfishly, any excuse to hang out together more often. And so, right there at the table, balancing our forks and our wine glasses while burping babies and coaxing kids to eat their vegetables, we began hashing out objectives and designing studies on cocktail napkins with restaurant-supplied crayons.

We decided to address the ‘Baby Blues’, a topic near and dear to both our hearts as moms, by determining how the immune system might be to blame. We knew from past research that mood disruptions during pregnancy and the postpartum period (commonly referred to as ‘the baby blues’) are extremely common. Problematically, the consequences of serious or persistent versions of these complications, like feeling constantly anxious or depressed, socially withdrawing from support, and not being interested in infant care-giving to name a few, have important negative impacts for both mother and child.

We also knew that emerging evidence from a number of laboratories implicates an imbalance in the immune system with the development of mood disorders in the general (non-pregnant) population. Importantly, during pregnancy, the function of the mother’s immune system is profoundly altered and generally suppressed to enable the fetus to develop without the mother’s body interpreting it as a foreign germ and attacking it. Over the course of several months during the postpartum period, the mother’s immune system must return to normal function to be able to fight infections. We thought that a lag in the recovery of normal immune function, especially among certain immune cells that may promote resilience to stress, may create an immune imbalance, potentially prolonging, or perhaps even causing, the ‘baby blues’ or worse, debilitating postpartum anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.

To test this hypothesis, we devised a project with two studies. For the first study, using groups of female mice, we sought to determine if the immune system of postpartum mice had a distinct profile from that of mice of the same age who had been previously pregnant or who had yet to experience a pregnancy. Since experience with stress is a significant predictor of the development of mood disorders and given that pregnancy and the postpartum period are associated with an increase in stress among mothers, we planned to determine if any immune system differences observed in these mice would be associated with how our animals responded to experimentally-induced, ethnologically-relevant stressors.

The study of women was to involve clinical assessment of new mothers’ experience with the baby blues, feelings of anxiety, or other mood disruptions and correlate these symptoms with levels of cytokines (proteins that signal to the immune system) and different immune cell populations in blood collected at several times during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The goal of these efforts will be to determine if the rate of immune recovery in the post-natal period is associated with the extent of mood disruptions and if pre-natal immune profiles could predict which mothers would be most at risk for pervasive postpartum blues.

It was quite a productive dinner and figuring out our aims was a major hurdle overcome! But we were still faced with the issue of time, or rather, a serious lack of it. The submission deadline was just over a week away and we are both very busy ladies! Juggling teaching loads, meeting schedules, experiments, and kids’ ballet classes, we hashed out a writing plan, and got to work. And after only a few days, a lot of hard work, and several absolutely necessary in-person coffee dates … I mean meetings, we had crafted our masterpiece and were ready to press the “Submit” button. A few months and a pandemic later, we got the great news that our interdisciplinary proposal was selected for funding by the WVU Research Office! We are both thrilled, excited to move this important project forward, and hopeful that our data will help ease the burden of postpartum mood disorders for moms and kids everywhere.

For more specific details about the scientific premise and the proposed experiments, please visit the Research tab.

Dr. Shari and Dr. Liz hard at “work” composing their masterpiece and celebrating its success! Feb 2020