The interrelationship between pregnancy-specific anxiety and general anxiety across pregnancy: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Background: High levels of prenatal maternal anxiety – either pregnancy-specific anxiety or general anxiety – may have detrimental effects on both the mother and her child. It is currently unknown how these two different expressions of anxiety influence each other over time during pregnancy.

Aims: This study aimed to describe the relationship between state, trait and pregnancy-specific anxiety levels across pregnancy.

Methods: Longitudinal data from three data-waves of a large-scaled sample of nulliparous normal risk pregnant women were used to display associations over time by means of autoregressive and cross-lagged panel models.

Results: Cross-lagged, cross-time pathways from pregnancy-specific anxiety to state as well as trait anxiety were positively significant, while vice versa the most consistent links were found from trait anxiety to pregnancy-specific anxiety.

Conclusions: We conclude that pregnancy-specific anxiety and general anxiety appear to influence each other over time, resulting in heightened anxiety for some soon-to-be mothers.

• Cross-lagged model
• pregnancy-specific anxiety
• state anxiety
• trait anxiety

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the help of midwives and practitioners in enthusing their patients to participate in our study, and all students who assisted in data collection for this study. Finally, we express our gratitude to all participating mothers for their high commitment to the study.