by Claudia Boyd-Barrett posted in Pregnancy

If you?ve suffered postpartum depression (PPD) once, you?ll want to be on the lookout for signs of it reoccurring during subsequent pregnancies, new research suggests.
A recent study published in PLoS Medicine found women who?d experienced one bout of PPD were significantly more likely than women who?d never suffered PPD to experience it again.
Researchers studied medical records on more than 450,000 women in Denmark who gave birth to their first child between 1996 and 2013 and had no prior history of depression. Then they identified women who suffered PPD serious enough to require treatment with antidepressants or hospitalization after the birth of their first or subsequent children.
According to the findings, women not identified as having PPD after their first child were very unlikely to experience it in later pregnancies. But women who required antidepressants or hospitalization for PPD after their first pregnancy were 27 to 46 percent more likely to seek treatment for the condition again after subsequent births.
The study didn?t identify women who may have had less serious PDD because it relied on records of antidepressant use or hospitalization. It?s possible some women in the study had the condition but sought talk therapy or did not get treatment, which could have skewed the results.
Even so, the study does appear to show a strong association between prior PPD and recurrence. Scientists also know that a history of any...