MHealth and Perinatal Depression in Low-and Middle-Income Countries: A Scoping Review of the Literature

Aliyah Dosani,Sahil Mazmudar,Harshmeet Arora

doi:10.3390/ijerph17207679

Abstract

Women in low- and middle-income countries have high rates of perinatal depression. As smartphones become increasingly accessible around the world, there is an opportunity to explore innovative mHealth tools for the prevention, screening, and management of perinatal depression. We completed a scoping review of the literature pertaining to the use of mobile phone technologies for perinatal depression in low-and middle-income countries. PubMed CINHAL, and Google Scholar databases were searched, generating 423 results. 12 articles met our inclusion criteria. Two of the 12 articles reviewed mobile phone applications. The remaining 9 articles were study protocols or descriptive/intervention studies. Our results reveal that minimal literature is currently available on the use of mobile health for perinatal depression in low- and middle-income countries. We found four articles that present the results of an intervention that were delivered through mobile phones for the treatment of perinatal depressive symptoms and an additional qualitative study describing the perceptions of mothers receiving cognitive behavioral therapy via telephones. These studies demonstrated that depressive symptoms improved after the interventions. There is potential to improve the quality of mHealth interventions, specifically mobile phone applications for perinatal depressive symptoms and depression, through meaningful collaborative work between healthcare professionals and application developers.

Highlights

Perinatal depression occurs while a woman is pregnant or within 12 months of delivery [1].While perinatal depression is common among diverse groups of women in many countries around the world [2,3,4,5], women in low- and middle-income countries experience a higher burden of this illness [6]
Of the 12 articles we included in our analysis, 3 (25%) were study protocols [41,42,43] and 2 (16.7%) were reviews of available mobile phone applications related to perinatal depression [44,45]
The other review article (50%) found that insufficient information is available regarding the authors or creators of the content in the postpartum depression mobile phone applications or where the information was obtained [45]. This is the first study of its kind, that we are aware of, that reviewed the current state of the literature on mHealth and perinatal depression in low- and middle-income countries

Summary

Introduction

While perinatal depression is common among diverse groups of women in many countries around the world [2,3,4,5], women in low- and middle-income countries experience a higher burden of this illness [6]. Recent studies have demonstrated that women in low- and middle-income countries have a perinatal depression rate of up to 48.5% [7,8,9,10,11]. These figures are alarming as the rates reported in high-income countries are much lower, ranging from 6.5% to 12.9% during the perinatal period [6,12]. Public Health 2020, 17, 7679; doi:10.3390/ijerph17207679 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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