Asthma linked to postpartum depression

Women who have asthma during their pregnancies are more likely to experience postpartum depression after delivery, a large Canadian study suggests.

Physicians should watch for signs of depression in their pregnant patients with asthma so treatment and coping strategies can start early, the authors write in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

“We knew asthma in general (outside of pregnancy) is associated with an increased risk of depression, so we suspected that asthma during pregnancy could increase the risk of postpartum depression,” said lead author Lucie Blais, a researcher at the Universite de Montreal.

“Women with asthma should be aware of the increased risk of postpartum depression and discuss quickly with their physician if they feel depressed or elaborate a strategy to minimize the risk before delivery,” Blais told Reuters Health in an email.

To assess the risk, Blais and her colleagues compared the health histories of more than 35,000 pregnant women with asthma and almost 200,000 women without asthma who delivered babies in Quebec between 1998 and 2009.

In the year after delivery, rates of postpartum depression were roughly double among women with asthma.

At one month postpartum, 0.8 percent of women with asthma were depressed, compared to 0.4 percent of women without asthma. At three months, about 2 percent of women with asthma had a depression diagnosis compared to 1 percent of women without asthma. And at one year, about 6 percent of women with asthma had postpartum depression compared to about 3 percent of women without asthma.