Prevalence of psychiatric disorders in the first trimester of pregnancy and factors associated with current suicide risk

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and to identify the factors associated with Current Suicide Risk (CSR) in the first trimester of pregnancy. The Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (M.I.N.I.) was employed to diagnose mental disorders in 239 women enrolled in a prospective cohort in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Serum lipids, leptin and socio-economic status were the independent variables. CSR, the dependent variable, was entered as binary (yes/no) variable into crude and adjusted Poisson regression models with robust variances. CSR was found to be the main psychiatric syndrome (18.4%), followed by agoraphobia (17.2%), major depressive disorder (15.1%) and generalized anxiety disorder (10.5%). Women with CSR showed higher mean levels of cholesterol (169.2 vs. 159.2; p=0.017), high density lipoprotein (50.4 vs. 47.7; p=0.031) and low density lipoprotein (102.8 vs. 95.6; p=0.022) when compared to women without CSR. The adjusted regression model showed a higher prevalence ratio (PR) of CSR among pregnant women with generalized anxiety disorder (PR=2.70, 95% CI: 1.36-5.37), with ≥ two parturitions (PR=2.46, 95% CI: 1.22-4.93), and with major depressive disorder (PR=2.11, 95% CI: 1.08-4.12). We have shown that generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder and higher parity are associated with CSR in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Keywords: Agoraphobia; Anxiety; Depressive disorder; Parity; Pregnancy; Suicide; Women.