Screening for perinatal anxiety disorder in Serbian women

Abstract

Perinatal generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has a high prevalence of 8.5%–10.5% during pregnancy and 4.4%–10.8% postpartum which is higher or as high as in general population. Despite its attendant dysfunction in the patient, this potentially debilitating mental health condition is often underdiagnosed due to difficulty in distinguishing normal versus pathological worry and nonexistent screening tool for perinatal GAD. The maternal dysfunction can potentially impact mother–infant bonding and influence neurodevelopment outcomes in the children.

Objective

To screen 100 women for anxiety symptoms during pregnancy and postpartum at the primary health center “Zvezdara”.

Methods

One thousand women were screened for anxiety symptoms using the GAD-7 and DSM-IV. Questionnaire that covered key demographic and obstetric information and GAD-7 and DSM-IV, were administered at the third trimester of pregnancy, and 8 weeks postpartum. Women were identified as at high risk for anxiety, cut-off scores of 5, 10, and 15 were taken as the cut off points for mild, moderate, and severe anxiety, respectively.

Results

Ten percent of the sample was screened positive for mild anxiety symptoms during pregnancy. Subsequently, efforts were made to follow-up women with a postnatal GAD-7 and 7.2% percent were screened positive during postpartum.

Conclusion

Clinicians should be aware of the frequency and level of anxiety symptoms during pregnancy and postpartum. Therefore, it is very important to identify women at high risk. Be aware that GAD is one of the risk factors that complicate pregnancy.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.