(565) Longitudinal trends in symptom and mood during pregnancy: a retrospective study from digital health app

Thursday, January 30, 2025

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Submitting Author(s)

Mia Charifson, PhD (she/her/hers)

Senior Data Science
Delfina Care Inc
Delfina Care Inc, CA, United States

Presenting Author(s)

Timothy Wen, MD, MPH (he/him/his)

Assistant Professor
University of California, San Diego
Irvine, California, United States

Coauthor(s)

BZ

Bonnie Zell, BA, MD, MPH

Chief Medical Officer
Delfina Care Inc
Delfina Care Inc, California, United States
IF

Isabel Fulcher, BA, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer
Delfina Care Inc
Delfina Care Inc, California, United States

Objective: Pregnancy symptomatology and mood are routinely captured during prenatal care, however, little data exists on how their trajectories vary throughout pregnancy. The use of mobile pregnancy trackers presents new opportunities to study symptom and mood trajectories throughout pregnancy.

Study Design: Pregnant patients from three clinics enrolled in a pregnancy mobile application between January 2023 and July 2024 and were instructed by their care team to track weekly pregnancy symptoms (100 unique symptoms available to select) and daily mood rating (1 to 5) in the application. We plot the trajectories of the top five symptom groups and average mood throughout pregnancy using cubic splines. We perform statistical tests for linear and quadratic terms in regression models to describe trends by gestational week.

Results: By July 2024, there were n=1445 patients using the application. 1073 users reported a total of 24,273 symptoms (average 22.62 symptoms per user) and 1100 reported a total of 29,148 mood measures (average 26.5 moods per user). The top five symptom groups ever reported in our cohort were constitutional, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, obstetric, and genitourinary symptoms (Table 1). Each symptom group had a unique trajectory throughout pregnancy (Figure 1). Musculoskeletal symptoms increased linearly (p< 0.01) and gastrointestinal symptoms decreased linearly (p< 0.01). Constitutional (p< 0.01), obstetric (p< 0.01), and genitourinary (p< 0.01) all had U-shaped curves throughout pregnancy. Average mood also exhibited a slight inverted U-shaped curve (p< 0.01), although variation throughout pregnancy was low overall (SD = 0.15).

Conclusion: We observed distinct trajectories of symptoms and mood throughout pregnancy. Such information could improve personalized pregnancy care, use evidence-based knowledge to normalize pregnancy experiences, and may be potentially informative for early detection of adverse outcomes.