Pregnancy, Depression & Tech

Pregnancy and depression are two words that are starting to be heard together more often. It's probably about time...

Perinatal Depression is More Common Than You Think (NY Times):  Perinatal Depression is estimated to affect 13% of women worldwide (between 180,000 and 800,000 of American women each year). A US Preventative Service Task Force panel recommended counseling for women with one or more of the risk factors for Perinatal Depression be covered by insurance (under the Affordable Care Act). 

Do I Have PPD? (Women's Mental Health): The Center for Women's Mental Health has a new app for screening for post partum depression called MGHPDS. I tried it out - at the moment is has a lot of different anxiety/depression scales and reminds you when to retake the surveys and recommends seeing your care team if necessary. It's definitely just a screening tool at the moment, but I think it will be interesting to see if tools like this can also offer support features in the future. 

Researching PPD (CNN):  The App, PPD Act, is part of Apple's Research Kit, and is helping study PPD in several countries. The key conclusion is that we need more awareness, research and participants.  40% of first time mothers don't know about the risks of PPD and many cases go undiagnosed and untreated. Check out the initial findings of the study here and their site here. 

New Drug Approved for PPD (NPR):  The FDA has approved the first drug, Zulresso, for post partum depression. This drug works quickly (48 hours) compared to over a month of regular anti-depressants, but requires 60 hours of infusion and costs $34,000 on average before insurance (and not counting hospitalization costs).  Read more here or watch this CBS Special.  If you want to hear more about why drug prices are so high for Women's Health related drugs, listen to this Femtastic Podcast.