Analysis of diurnal variation of Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale in postpartum women through social networking sites “Twitter”

Abstract

Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) is widely used to screen for postpartum depression in Japan, while the Verification of diurnal variation affecting EPDS scores had not been done until now. Since social networking sites such as Twitter is informative for mothers to share their experiences and feelings in recent years, we invited postpartum women to post the tweets including their EPDS scores online to assess the characteristics among postpartum women with depressive symptom. From 8:00 pm on January 11 to 8:00 pm on January 12, 2020, we collected 2,326 tweets using our Japanese hashtag. We collected the EPDS scores which can be completed online and 2,195 tweets were confirmed that the EPDS scores were included. The median EPDS scores of 2,195 tweets were 9.0±0.6. 57% of tweets included the EPDS scores of 9 points or higher. We found the median EPDS scores in each posting time peaking around 4:00 AM. In our study, the posted EPDS scores were generally higher than those in the previous studies and fluctuated depending on the time of day. We need to be aware of the possibility of diurnal changes in postpartum depressive symptoms or possibility to reported lower than actual EPDS scores.