One in seven women experience depression during pregnancy or the first year after giving birth, yet many may not realize it or report their concerns to clinicians. A new proposal by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force could help change that. It recommends that all women who are pregnant or within a year of giving birth be screened for perinatal depression, as it’s called. The screening proposal is included as part of a broader recommendation to screen all adults for depression that the task force released this week for public comment. The task force proposal would update the current guidelines, adopted in 2009, which recommend depression screening in all adults if clinicians are available to address depression care. In the 2009 document, the task force didn’t review depression in pregnant and postpartum women and made no screening recommendation for them.
[For more of this story, written by Michelle Andrews, go to http://khn.org/news/prevention...nant-women-new-moms/]
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