Mental health concerns during pregnancy associated with the risk of preterm birth: A retrospective cohort study

Backgrounds: There are multiple risk factors for preterm birth (PTB), one of the most important of which is mood disorders during pregnancy. We aimed to comprehensively investigate the association of both total mental health concerns and ten specific psychiatric symptoms with PTB risk.

Methods: A cohort study was performed consisting of 25,175 pregnant women who participated in Women and Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University between 2020 and 2022. The Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) was utilized to assess the psychiatric symptoms. Multivariable or multinomial logistic regression was applied to investigate mental health concerns associated with risk of PTB or its different clinical sub-categories, respectively. Sensitivity analyses were further performed to validate the results.

Results: 8336 women who met the inclusion criteria were included; of these, 547 (6.6 %) had preterm deliveries, and 2542 (30.5 %) had mental health concerns. Compared with women with healthy minds, women with total mental health concerns had a 29.0 % higher risk of overall PTB (OR = 1.28, 95%CI = 1.07-1.54), medical-induced PTB (OR = 1.49, 95%CI = 1.05-2.13) and spontaneous PTB with premature rupture of membranes (OR = 1.33, 95%CI = 1.01-1.74). As to the specific psychological symptoms, hostility pregnant women had a 55.0 % higher risk of PTB (OR = 1.55, 95%CI = 1.14-2.11). Similar results were observed in most of the sensitivity analyses.

Limitations: This is a single-center study, thus the extrapolation of the results may be limited.

Conclusions: Pregnant women with mental health symptoms, especially hostility, have an increased risk of PTB. The findings underscore that integrating mental health services into routine maternal care may be a strategy to prevent PTB.