WOMEN : ESTROGEN MAY BE KEY TO CURING POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION.

Byline: Jacqueline Stenson Medical Tribune News Service

An estrogen-containing skin patch may help the one in 10 women who suffer clinical depression in the first few months after giving birth, British researchers report.

In a six-month study of 61 women with postpartum depression, the moods of half of those who wore the estrogen skin patches improved rapidly after just one month, whereas another group treated with a placebo patch showed little improvement.

Pretreatment evaluations of the women within three months of giving birth confirmed that all were severely depressed.

But by one month after therapy began, self-rated depression scores showed that only 50 percent of the women receiving estrogen therapy were still depressed, compared with 74 percent of those in the placebo group, according to the study, published this week in the British medical journal the Lancet.

After three months, only 20 percent of women in the treatment group were depressed, compared with 69 percent in the placebo group, the study showed.

Most cases of postpartum depression eventually resolve on their own within six months after birth, according to the researchers. Yet one-quarter of such women remain depressed a year later, they said.Women with the condition may be offered counseling and/or antidepressant drugs, but results with these treatments have been mixed, the researchers from London and Salisbury, England, said.

In fact, nearly half of the women who wore an estrogen patch had taken antidepressants for at least six weeks before the new study began, without any detectable benefit, according to the study.

How estrogen alleviates postpartum depression is not known, the researchers said.

Estrogen could help depressed new mothers because ``there are huge hormonal changes after delivery,'' said Dr. Nada Stotland, an associate professor of psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago.But nobody knows exactly what causes postpartum depression, so it is difficult to figure out how to remedy it, she said. ``It's probably a multifactorial phenomenon,'' she said.

In addition to hormonal changes, the stress and demands of being a new mother and the transfer of attention from the expectant mother to the new baby also could contribute to depression, Stotland said.

While the results of the new study are promising, more research is needed to determine whether estrogen therapy truly is of benefit, she added.