Quantitative description of subjective symptoms in pregnant women and their changes during the perinatal period.

ABSTRACT

To study chronological changes in the spatial representation of subjective symptoms in pregnant women, the authors formulated a check list to employ throughout the period of pregnancy. Using this check list, 162 pregnant women were examined (1,773 examinations). Women who were delivered of normal full-term neonates were adopted for the study. The authors obtained the following results: The simple analysis supported the previous descriptions in many reports in literature. From multivariate analysis (biplot analysis and latent structure analysis) using no external standards, the distribution structure of the spatially represented subjective symptoms during pregnancy varied among the five periods of pregnancy (weeks 0-12, weeks 13-20, weeks 21-28, weeks 29-34 and weeks 35-). These results suggest that, for mass screening of high-risk pregnancy, a filter of subjective symptoms for each of the above-mentioned 5 periods of pregnancy should be prepared.