United States: Pregnant women with MS demonstrate more mental health problems than those without MS.
A new Neurology publication reveals that pregnant MS patients develop mental health challenges throughout pregnancy and right after childbirth, as reported by HealthDay.
Increased Prevalence of Mental Health Issues
Women with MS experience elevated mental health risks, which total 26% when they are pregnant and 33% when they have a child compared to other pregnant women.
And the lead researcher, Dr. Ruth Ann Marrie, a professor of medicine and community health sciences at the University of Manitoba in Canada, noted that ‘Mental health struggles can affect both parents and kids, which emphasizes the need to know how mental health issues during pregnancy affect people with MS.’
Researchers tracked the health of almost 900,000 mothers, including more than 1,700 with multiple sclerosis, for the study. Instead, they evaluated records two years before and three years after participants became pregnant.
Specific Mental Health Concerns
The research experts studied medical records to find which women had received mental health diagnoses.
Research data reveals that mental health problems touched 42% of women with MS before pregnancy and rose to 50% within one year after childbirth.
Compared with the 30% of women without MS who had mental health problems during pregnancy and the 38% in the first year after birth.
Of those with MS, 8 percent were diagnosed with a new mental illness during pregnancy and 14 percent in the first year following childbirth, compared with 7 percent and 11 percent of women without MS.
The results also indicate that women with MS are at increased risk of all specific mental illnesses (except suicide attempts).
But strikingly, substance abuse went from 0.5% during pregnancy to 6% following childbirth, according to the researchers, in people with MS.
Potential Contributing Factors
Researchers said it could be that this increased risk of mental illness is a side effect of being pregnant — mental stress, hormone changes, and systemic changes to a woman’s body when she’s pregnant. This includes pregnant women who are more likely to be at increased risk for blood clots, insulin resistance, and changes to their immune systems, as reported by HealthDay.
“These findings emphasize the need for preventive and early treatment of mental illness,” Marrie concluded. “Future studies should look at how MS affects mental health in mothers during and after pregnancy and if it’s worse in different stages of MS. Doctors should know about these risks, make sure to check mental health, and provide treatment if needed.”