Screening of postpartum depression among new mothers in Istanbul: a psychometric evaluation of the Turkish Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale

Abstract

Objective: This study is the first concerted effort to ascertain factor structure of EPDS using evidence based analytical techniques. It is the most widely used scale for assessing postpartum depression in Turkey, and yet no investigations have been conducted to assess it factor structure. This study was conducted from April 2012 to April 2018 at the Marmara University Hospital operating under the name of Marmara University Pendik Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul Turkey. Results: A total of 1700 women were included in this study, who responded to the EPDS, in addition to demographic characteristics and well-being of their offspring. A total of 1615 mothers provided adequate data for inclusion in analysis. Standardized Chronbach's alpha for EPDS was 0.81 with corrected item-total correlations ranging from 0.35 to 0.62. Parallel analysis, MAP Velicer Test and Hull's method dictated retaining of one factor structure. All the items revealed adequate communalities (> 0.20) except item 2 (enjoyment) and item 10 (self-harm). Their communalities were 0.16 and 0.19, however, these items were not dropped. All of the items yielded moderate to strong factor loadings. Minimum factor loading was for item 2 (0.40) and highest for item 8 (0.71).

Delivering the Thinking Healthy Programme as a universal group intervention integrated into routine antenatal care: a randomized-controlled pilot study

“…For added feasibility and cost-effectiveness, future studies might, in line with WHO recommendations, focus the intervention to women at high risk for depression, e.g., women who have anxiety symptoms or sub-clinical depression so that resources are targeted to those who are most in need. We found relatively low prevalence of perinatal depression in our sample (3.4%) compared to the rate of 19% indicated in a recent study in Turkey [4]. This could indicate that women with depression might not be accessing routine antenatal care and/or attending the online pregnancy schools [52,53].…”

“…Turkey with a population of approximately 84.6 million is one of the largest countries in Europe and Central Asia region [3]. Studies from the country show that 19.1% of new mothers had depressive symptoms in the early postpartum period [4]. PND bears negative physiological and psychological outcomes for both mother and child.…”

Communication Across Maternal Social Networks During England’s First National Lockdown and Its Association With Postnatal Depressive Symptoms

“…Levels of depressive symptoms were high in our sample. Typically, EPDS scores in the general population are heavily skewed to the lower end of the scale (Alvarado et al, 2015;Coll et al, 2017;Martin and Redshaw, 2018;Smith-Nielsen et al, 2018;Boran et al, 2020); however, in our sample, they approximated a normal distribution with a mean of 10.4 (SD 4.7) (Figure 1 and Supplementary Figure 1). While comprehensive descriptive statistics of EPDS scores are rare in the literature, a pre-pandemic mean of 6.4 (SD 6.9) has been reported for English mothers at 3 months post-birth (Martin and Redshaw, 2018) and one of 7.2 (SD 4.4) among firsttime Irish mothers at 6 weeks post-birth (Leahy-Warren et al, 2012).…”

Young children's sleep patterns and problems in paediatric primary healthcare settings: a multicentre cross‐sectional study from a nationally representative sample

“…Mothers completed the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scales. The EPDS is a 10-item self-administered scale developed for the detection of symptoms of psychosocial distress during the perinatal period and shows good psychometric properties (Boran et al, 2020;Cox et al, 1987;Karacam & Kitis, 2008). A cut-off score of 12 was considered positive for depressive symptomatology.…”