Browsing by Author "Petito, Lucia"

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Food security mediates the decrease in women's depressive symptoms in a participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention in rural Tanzania.
(Cambridge University Press 2021, 2021-03-12) Cetrone, Hollyn; Santoso, Marianne; Bezner Kerr, Rachel; Petito, Lucia; Blacker, Lauren; Nonga, Theresia; Martin, Haikael; Kassim, Neema; Mtinda, Elias; Young, Sera
Objective: To investigate if food security mediated the impact of a nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention on women’s depressive symptoms. Design: We used annual longitudinal data (4 time points) from a cluster-randomized effectiveness trial of a participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention, the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project (SNAP-Tz). Structural equation modelling estimation of total, natural direct, and natural indirect effects was used to investigate food security’s role in the intervention’s impact on women’s risk of probable depression (CES-D > 17) across three years. Setting: Rural Singida, Tanzania. Participants: 548 food insecure, married, smallholder women farmers with children < 1-year-old at baseline. Results: At baseline, one third of the women in each group had probable depression (Control: 32.0%, Intervention: 31.9%, p difference=0.97). The intervention lowered odds of probable depression by 43% (OR=0.57, 95% CI: 0.43-0.70). Differences in food insecurity explained approximately 10 percentage points of the effects of the intervention on odds of probable depression (OR = 0.90, 95% CI: 0.83-0.95). Conclusions: This is the first evidence of the strong, positive effect that lowering food insecurity has on reducing women’s depressive symptoms. Nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions can have broader impacts than previously demonstrated, i.e., improvements in mental health, and changes in food security play an important causal role in this pathway. As such, these data suggest participatory nutrition-sensitive agroecology interventions have the potential to be an accessible method of improving women’s wellbeing in farming communities.
A Participatory Agroecological Intervention Reduces Women’s Risk of Probable Depression Through Improvements in Food Security in Singida, Tanzania
(Elsevier, 2020-06) Cetrone, Hollyn; Santoso, Marianne; Petito, Lucia; Bezner-Kerr, Rachel; Blacker, Lauren; Kassim, Neema; Mtinda, Elias; Martin, Haikael; Young, Sera
In 2015, depressive disorders led to over 50 million disability-adjusted life years lost globally, with more than 80% occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Depressive disorders are also risk factors of a number of adverse maternal and child health outcomes. To our knowledge, the Singida Nutrition and Agroecology Project (SNAP-Tz), is the first nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) intervention identified to improve women’s probable depression (2020). Food security has been posited to play an important role in the relationship between NSA interventions and depression, yet causal factors have not yet been analyzed quantitatively. Therefore, we investigated food security’s mediating role on this impact.