Anxiety, Depression of Pregnant Women During Covid-19 Pandemic: Article Review

Abstract

"The article is the review of the available research papers on anxiety, depression, stress and signs of PTSD in pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Articles were searched in the databases of Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO, APA using the keywords ""pregnancy"", ""COVID-19"", ""anxiety"","" depression"","" stress"","" PTSD"". For this article review we selected only those research studies that have comparatively large samples, with the most widely used measures: State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), Edinburg Postpartum Depression Scale (EPDS), and Impact of a Traumatic Event Scale (IES-R). In these studies levels of anxiety, depression and PTSD are either compared to the existing cut-off scores for these disorders in the literature or in COVID-19 and pre-COVID cohorts of pregnant women. Some papers include not only women during pregnancy but also postpartum. Data here are presented only on pregnancy. The results show that 22% to 68% of pregnant women experience moderate to severe anxiety, and it is two to five times more than the prevalence of anxiety in the literature. The state anxiety has increased more compared to trait anxiety. 14.9%-34.2% of women report on clinically significant levels of depression, and it is twice higher than the pre-existing data. About 10.3% of pregnant population have PTSD signs which falls into a moderate range. The levels of anxiety, depression and PTSD are significantly higher in COVID-19 cohorts than in pre-COVID samples. The most predicting factor for anxiety, depression and PTSD is the pre-existing mental health disorder of anxiety or depression."