Is pregnancy-specific anxiety more enduring than general anxiety using self-report measures? A short-term longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

Objective: To investigate whether the rates of transient and enduring distress differ between general and pregnancy-specific anxiety in antenatal English-speaking women.

Background: Evidence indicates that half of women with high levels of general anxiety during pregnancy will no longer be highly anxious after a few weeks, without having received treatment. Pregnancy-specific anxiety, however, may be more enduring, as many worries concerning the forthcoming birth, whether the baby will be healthy and the woman’s ability to care for a newborn are likely to continue, or increase, during the pregnancy.

Method: Women attending a public hospital antenatal clinic completed several mood questionnaires, including a mix of general anxiety and pregnancy-specific anxiety scales (T1). Between 2 and weeks later (T2), still during pregnancy, participants completed the same measures via a phone interview.

Results: Between 76 and 243 women completed the different measures at both time points. For each measure the result was similar: about half of women scoring high at the first assessment (T1) continued to score high at T2 on both the general and pregnancy-specific anxiety measures, despite not receiving any specialist intervention. By contrast, over 90% of women initially scoring low on the various measures continued to score low at T2.

Conclusion: Whether women are screened for pregnancy-specific or for general anxiety, around half scoring ‘high’ on the measure will no longer be in the anxious range a few weeks later. They thus have ‘transient’ anxiety. This transient/enduring finding was also confirmed for those with high levels of depressive symptomatology.

KEYWORDS:

• Screening
• perinatal mental health
• anxiety
• distress
• depression

Acknowledgments

The staff of the Liverpool Hospital antenatal clinics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The findings reported for this revised measure should not therefore be taken to represent what may have been found with the original measure.