Network Analysis of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression During Pregnancy: An Integrated Perspective on Topics and Dimensions

Prenatal stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms exhibit high prevalence among pregnant women, posing serious threats to maternal physical and mental health, pregnancy outcomes, and offspring development. This study employed network analysis to construct and compare pregnancy stress-anxiety-depression networks with topics and dimensions as nodes. Centrality analysis identified core nodes, and the network's stability was assessed using the bootstrap method. Results revealed that pregnancy stress, anxiety, and depression form a tightly interwoven interactive network. At the item level, "Worry about not receiving sufficient psychological support" emerged as the most central node within the pregnancy stress network. At the dimension level, the role dimension exhibited the highest centrality in the pregnancy stress network, while the depression dimension served as the core of the hospital anxiety and depression network. Further analysis showed that the centrality stability coefficients of all networks exceeded 0.5, indicating robust and reliable network structures. This study offers new insights into the interactive mechanisms of negative emotions during pregnancy, and the identified core symptoms provide key targets for precise clinical interventions.