| Mijke Lambregtse-van den Berg is a perinatal psychiatrist, infant psychiatrist and infant mental health specialist. Associate professor at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Her clinical and research work is focused on perinatal psychiatry and offspring development: How to prevent these disorders and the transmission from mother or father to the child?She is working with families during pregancy that need a special care until the children are 4 years old. Psychiatric and somatic problems. She works with obstetrics and muinicipalities. Mijke developed and implemented a public screening program, in routine obstetric care: Mind2Care, an online questionnaire, that families have to fill in, about psychiatric symptoms, psychosocial symptoms and substance use. When completed they immediately get a treatment advice and they can discuss it with their obstetrician. In NL: it is implemented in about 1/3 of all obstetric care. Mind2Care has already been translated in many different languages to be able to implement it in other countries. |
Article written by SubWG1: Clinical practice guidelines with recommendations for peripartum depression: A European systematic review.
Within the Cost Action, Mijke is the leader of subWorking Group 1 of Working Group 1. SubWG1 is dedicated to diagnosis and treatment of PPD. Cost Action Rise Up PPD is a European network, so first this subworking group decided to focus on existing clinical practice guidelines to treat peripartum depression and collect those protocols. All members of the network were contacted, and other contacts through the network to cover as many EU countries as possible. In addition, the group conducted a review in the literature, to see what was already published. Some guidelines provided recommendations on pharmacological treatments, some on psychological treatments, some on screening, diagnosis or other treatments. All the info was combined and listed by country. Then they tried to integrate the most common practices, and identified what needs to be done in future. This paper is a first step towards more integration and harmonisation across EU countries regarding the clinical part: diagnosis and treatment of PPD.
The conclusion was that most European countries have no guidelines at all regarding PeriPartum Depression. Some countries mention a short paragraph about PPD in the general guidelines regarding diagnosing and treatment of depression, but very few are the countries that have proper guidelines regarding PPD.
Inside the cost Action, in subWG3, a paper was published about treatment of PPD with antidepressants and other medication and another paper on non-invasive treatment of PPD, like ECT, TMS and bright light therapy. And another review on complementary non-conventional therapies is going to be published soon, about food, vitamins, exercise, yoga, mindfulness and massage.
The absence of Clinical Practice Guidelines in most European countries, may lead to disparities and inequalities in the management of peri partum depression in Europe. The Cost Action Riseup-PPD highlights key considerations and will integrate all the different products from the working groups in the new European guidelines about Peri-Partum Depression, that will be published by the Cost Action.
Clinical practice guidelines with recommendations for peripartum depression: A European systematic review – Motrico – 2022 – Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica – Wiley Online Library
Treatment of Peripartum Depression with Antidepressants and Other Psychotropic Medications: A Synthesis of Clinical Practice Guidelines in Europe – PMC (nih.gov)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8872607/
