Prevalence and determinants of postpartum depression among women attending tertiary care centre in North India

Abstract

Background: Postpartum depression is a mood disorder that occurs within 4 weeks-1 year after childbirth and the symptoms may range anywhere from persistent sadness or, anhedonia, fatigue, sleep disturbance to difficulty bonding with the baby, suicide, thoughts of harming the baby. Postpartum depression has unknown etiology, but various risk factors such as history of psychiatric illness, relationship with the spouse, education level, domestic violence, lack of social support, financial status, younger age at pregnancy, obstetrics stress and complications plays important role.

Methods: An analytical cross-sectional study was conducted on 504 mothers of 6 week to 1year postpartum period attending OBG OPD, private medical college, Agra for regular check-up during time span of 6 months (1st October 2025 to 30th April 2026). Data was collected on various sociodemographic, obstetrics factors along with EPDS (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale) score after getting informed consent from subjects.

Results: The study finding show 42.9%women had postpartum depression. Various factors such as young age, residence, religion, education, socioeconomic status, parity, number of children, birth spacing, number of female children and birth weight showed significant association through chi-square test but on applying binary logistic regression only young age, religion, education less than high school and unplanned pregnancy where significant predictors others variables association were not established.

Conclusions: Postpartum depression goes undiagnosed due to social stigma, guilt or the perception that sadness is normal. Screening tools like EPDS must be incorporated into mother and child health programmes, capacity building of grass root level workers to be done to bring about education, support and awareness to young and low educated women of the community.