New Delhi:Women with autoimmune diseases could be more likely to suffer from depression during pregnancy and after childbirth, researchers have found.
They also observed a converse relationship where women with a history of pregnancy and childbirth-linked, or perinatal, depression might be at a higher risk of developing autoimmune diseases where the body's immune system mistakenly starts attacking healthy tissues. Some of the common autoimmune diseases include gluten intolerance, rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.
The researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, found the association was strongest for multiple sclerosis -- a neurological disease. It was also strongest among women with no previous psychiatric diagnosis. However, being an observational study, the researchers couldn't draw a causal link. Their findings have been published in the "Molecular Psychiatry" journal.
"Our study suggests that there's an immunological mechanism behind perinatal depression and that autoimmune diseases should be seen as a risk factor for this kind of depression," said the study's first author Emma Brnn, a researcher at Karolinska Institutet's Institute of Environmental Medicine.
For the study, the researchers used Swedish Medical Birth Register data to identify women who had given birth in Sweden between 2001 and 2013. Of the more than eight lakh women and 13 lakh pregnancies included in the study, the team found that more than 55,000 had been diagnosed with depression during their pregnancies or within a year after delivery.