Anxiety & Depression Among Pregnant Women at a Tertiary Centre

Background

Common mental health disorders in pregnancy, particularly anxiety and depression, are frequently under-detected in routine antenatal care despite their consequences for maternal and child outcomes. This collaborator-led clinical study screened pregnant women attending a tertiary care centre in Telangana to estimate the burden of antenatal anxiety and depression and to characterise the referral cascade for those screening positive.

Approach

A cross-sectional design was used, with anxiety screened via the GAD-7 and depression via the PHQ-9, scored into standard severity bands (minimal, mild, moderate, moderately severe, severe). A referral criterion flagged participants with moderate-or-greater anxiety or depression, and onward attendance with a psychiatrist was tracked. Arun led the analysis in R, using gtsummary for descriptive tables within a fully reproducible Quarto pipeline (results_manuscript.qmd).

What we found

• Descriptive epidemiology covered sociodemographics (age, income, education, family type, Kuppuswamy socioeconomic status) and trimester distribution across the screened cohort.
• Prevalence of any anxiety and any depressive symptoms, severity distributions, and anxiety-depression comorbidity were estimated; exact figures will be reported on publication.
• Symptom burden was examined across trimesters of pregnancy.
• A referral cascade was constructed, quantifying the share of screen-positive women who attended psychiatric assessment.

Outputs & impact

The study provides tertiary-centre estimates of antenatal mental health burden in Telangana and highlights gaps between screening, referral, and psychiatric follow-up that routine antenatal services could close. Outputs include a reproducible Quarto analysis and publication-ready gtsummary tables and figures summarising prevalence and the referral cascade.