Previous studies have shown that strong relationships exist between deprived environments and teenage motherhood. However, such studies have predominantly identified deprivation using neighbourhood-wide measures of socio-economic status. Few studies of teenage parenthood have examined how individuals perceive their environment and the importance of this perception on reproductive behaviour and timing. Using data collected from a sample of women living the county of Gloucestershire, UK, this paper explores the predictive value of two methods of assessing the environment: (1) the structural component-deprivation at the neighbourhood level and (2) the individual's subjective experience of her pre-pregnancy environment, when examining how the wider environmental context can influence the decision of becoming a teenage mother. The results indicate that a woman's perception of her neighbourhood of residence at the time she conceived, her perceived environmental risk, may be a more discriminating predictor of teenage motherhood than deprivation measured by ward economic and deprivation indicators.

Postnatal depression (PND) is known to be associated with a range of detrimental child and adolescent outcomes, resulting from its disruptive impact on mother-child relationship quality. However, until now little has been known about the impact of PND on the longer-term relationships between mothers and their children, and any intergenerational effects this may have. Mother-child relationship quality is of interest from an evolutionary perspective as it plays a role in the accrual of offspring embodied capital, thus affecting offspring quality and offspring’s capacity to subsequently invest in their own children. Relationships with offspring also mediate grandparent-grandchild relations; if PND negatively affects long-term mother–offspring relationship quality, it is also likely to negatively affect grandmaternal investment via reduced grandmother–grandchild relationship quality. Here, we use responses to a retrospective questionnaire study of postmenopausal women, largely from the UK and US, to assess the impact of PND occurring in generation 1 on mother–child relationship quality across the life course of the child (generation 2) with whom it was associated, and also on the relationship quality with grandchildren (generation 3) from that child. Average mother-child relationship quality was lower when the child’s birth was associated with PND. Multi-level regression modelling found that mother-child relationship quality decreased as PND symptom severity increased after controlling for individual effects and a variety of other factors known to influence relationship quality (individual mothers n = 296, mother-child dyads n = 646). Additionally, intergenerational relationships appear to be affected, with PND negatively associated with grandmother-grandchild relations (individual grandmothers n = 125, relations with grandchildren from n = 197 grandmother-parent dyads). That PND has long-term detrimental consequences for mother-child relationships, well beyond adolescence, highlights the need for investment in strategies to prevent PND and its cascade of negative multigenerational effects.

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Although lymphocytes in phytohaemagglutinin (PHA)-stimulated whole blood cultures are routinely used to assess genotoxin-induced chromosome damage, very little information is available on the effect of PHA on the various cell populations present, and there appear to be no data for the protocols used in routine genotoxicity assays. In this study, we used flow cytometric analysis to examine the size/complexity of the white blood cell (WBC) population and the expression of key antigenic markers by the lymphocytes over a 96-h period following PHA stimulation. The changes in the WBC population are complex, and would seem to represent different populations dying out, remaining static or starting to divide. The initial decrease seen in overall cell numbers probably reflects death of the neutrophil and monocyte populations. The subsequent increase in cell numbers appears to be due to division of the lymphocytes and, by 96 h post-stimulation, they comprise about half the total cell number and, as expected, > 90% are activated T-cells; it seems reasonable to assume that these represent the target cells in genotoxicity assays. Although we do not suggest that these findings should alter the routine conduct of clastogenicity assays using PHA-stimulated whole-blood cultures, they indicate that such tests are empirical and that closer investigation will only confirm their relatively imprecise nature.

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