A study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice found that women who experience asthma during pregnancy have an increased likelihood of postpartum depression.
To assess the risk, the researchers compared the health histories of more than 35,000 pregnant women with asthma and almost 200,000 women without asthma who delivered babies in Quebec between 1998 and 2009.
In the year after delivery, rates of postpartum depression were roughly double among women with asthma.
At one month postpartum, 0.8% of women with asthma were depressed, compared to 0.4% of women without asthma. At three months, about 2% of women with asthma had a depression diagnosis compared to 1% of women without asthma. And at one year, about 6% of women with asthma had postpartum depression compared to about 3% of women without asthma.
