الفهرس 
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Abstract
Pregnancy is one of the most important periods in women’s life, as it is associated with multiple changes not just physically but also psychologically and socially. Postpartum depression is considered to be one of the most common complications of childbearing, affecting a considerable proportion of women with higher prevalence among teenage mothers.
Early regulation problems such as excessive crying, feeding and sleeping problems are common during infancy. The development of night time sleep consolidation is widely recognized as one of the major developmental tasks of infancy. Infants differ, however, in their ability to achieve organized sleep-wake behavior. Disturbance of infant sleep can pose serious challenges to parents’ capacity to cope during the first year of development, contributing to family stress, increasing negative perceptions and resulting in a loss of the mother’s confidence in her parenting ability. Maternal depression has been proposed as a factor associated with problems of infant sleep.
Research exploring the association between maternal depression and infant sleep has been conducted from two different viewpoints: maternal depression and its association with infant sleep and the contribution of infant sleep disturbance to maternal depression by means of disruption to the mother’s sleep cycle.
Objectives of the study
• To estimate the prevalence of postpartum depression.
• To estimate the prevalence of feeding and sleeping problems in infants of mothers having postpartum depression.
• To find out the relationship between postpartum depression in mothers & infants’ feeding and sleeping problems.
Subjects and methods
To carry out the study, a cross-sectional design was used. After obtaining the official approval of the MOHP, the researcher visited the Family Health Care Unit of Abis (10), Middle Health District, Alexandria to represent a rural area and Smouha Health Care Unit, East Health District, Alexandria to represent an urban area.
The target was all females attending both health care units during the field work period (3-months duration) in postpartum period up to one year of infants’ age.
Data was collected by through an interview using a pre-designed structured interviewing questionnaire. It covered the following items:
• Personal and social characteristics: included maternal age, marital status, level of education, employment status, husband’s level of education, husband’s occupation, family size, number of rooms, place of residence, family income, number of children and spacing between children number of living persons in the same house, number of bedrooms, crowding index and sleeping crowding index.
• Arabic Version of Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS): This screening test included 10 items, each item was scored on a four-point scale from 0 to 3. The scores of all the questions were summed and the cutoff point used for diagnosis of possible of depression was 10 or more. Mothers with total scores below 10 were not depressed, while those with score of 10 or more were possibly depressed.
• Infant sleep questionnaire (ISQ): it included 4 sections with a total of 23 questions. Each question was graded on a scale from 0 to 2 referring to the frequency of the problem within a week as almost never happens, or it happens in half of the days or it almost always happens. According to the question, “almost never” or “almost always” score either 0 or 2 while “half of the days” scores 1. The lowest possible score to be 0 indicating the biggest sleeping problems and the highest sleeping score to be 46 indicating no problems at all.
Data entry- after coding- was performed by the researcher using SPSS program and descriptive statistics were used for summarization.