Adverse pregnancy outcomes and pre-pregnancy mental health care.

Abstract

Langham et al report consistent positive associations between pre-pregnancy mental health interventions and important adverse pregnancy outcomes, including delivery of a small for gestational age infant, preterm birth and perinatal death (i.e. stillbirth or neonatal death)1. They achieved this by record linkage of routine NHS obstetric outcome data to mental health care records. Generally associations were stronger where the mental health intervention was more proximal to pregnancy onset and with increasing scale of mental health treatment. However, the association with perinatal death was relatively modest and was confined to the relatively small proportion of women who had hospital based treatment, hence the attributable fraction of perinatal deaths which relates to this association will be small.