Background: Universal 2-child policy was proposed in 2015 in China, but it was still uncertain whether having a second child would have any impacts on maternal health, especially mental health. So, the aim of this study was to compare the incidence of perinatal depression between the first-child women and the second-child women and to describe the patterns of perinatal depression from the first and third trimesters to 6 weeks postpartum.
Methods: A prospective cohort study was conducted in a university hospital, 969 first-child women and 492 second-child women registered in this hospital from Dec 2017 to Mar 2018 were involved in the study. The Mainland Chinese version of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) was applied to screen perinatal depressive symptoms, while socio-demographic and obstetric data were obtained by self-administered questionnaires. Multiple logistic regression analyses were used to compare the risk of depression between 2 groups, and repeated measures of analysis of variances (ANOVAs) were used to determine the EPDS scores of 2 groups across 3 stages.
Results: The incidence of perinatal depression was 21.78% to 24.87% and 18.29% to 22.15% in the first-child group and the second-child group, respectively. The second-child women were less likely to exhibit depressive symptoms than the first-child women in the first trimester (Adjusted OR = 0.630, 95%CI = 0.457-0.868, P = .005), but no significant difference was found between the 2 groups in the third trimester and at postpartum period. During the whole perinatal period, no significant difference was found in EPDS scores of the first-child group among the three stages. However, the EPDS scores of the second-child group were higher in the first trimester than that at the postpartum period.
Conclusion: The risk of perinatal depression for the second-child women was no higher than for the first-child women, and the EPDS scores of the second-child women were decreasing during the perinatal period. So couples in West China are recommended to consider having a second child without much worry about its negative effects on mental health under the universal 2-child policy.