PhD-Student University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark
Background: Postpartum depression (PPD) is a serious and common disease among new parents affecting approximately 10-15% of mothers and 8% of fathers. PPD symptoms can be measured using the validated Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), which in Denmark is done as a part of the national antenatal care program by health nurses approximately 8 weeks postpartum. These screening records have from 2015 and forward become available for research purposes, posing a unique opportunity to describe postpartum depressive symptoms among Danish mothers and fathers including time trends in the years before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objectives: To describe mean EPDS scores among new mothers and fathers and compare mean scores according to sex and calendar year, including the years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: We conducted a descriptive study reporting mean EPDS-scores among mothers and fathers. EPDS measures depressive symptoms (scale range 0-30) with higher score indicating increased depressive symptoms. EPDS scores was obtained from health nurses’ records on postpartum home visits from 68 out of 98 municipalities in Denmark from 2015-2021, likely representative of postpartum depressive symptoms among Danish new parents in general. Preliminary analyses were conducted using aggregated data across sex, calendar year, and municipality and all analyses were weighted to account for the underlying number of screening records. For mothers and fathers, we reported mean EPDS scores overall and by year and we compared overall EDPS scores using a t-test. Further, we used linear regression to determine whether there was a trend in EPDS score across calendar time.
Results: Analyses were based on EPDS scores obtained from a total of 112822 mothers and 42085 fathers in Denmark. Mean EPDS scores was 5.04 among mothers and 3.44 among fathers, corresponding to an overall mean difference of 1.6 (95% CI 1.53 ; 1,68). Mean EPDS score among mothers increased steadily throughout the study period from 4.83 in 2015 to 5.28 in 2021 with a mean 0.07 (95% CI: 0.05 ; 0.09) change in EPDS per year. Mean EPDS scores were highest during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 and 2021). In contrast, among fathers no trend was observed across calendar time, neither before nor during the pandemic (mean change per year 0.01, 95% CI: -0.02 ; 0.03).
Conclusions: We found mean EPDS score to be significantly higher among new mothers compared to fathers, and that mothers´ EPDS scores increased across the study period, while fathers´ scores remained stable. It could not be determined whether the pandemic had specific impact on mothers’ depressive symptoms, but the observed trend across time should call for increased focus on depressive symptoms in new mothers.
