Ansiedade de mães de recém-nascidos com e sem malformações congênitas em unidade neonatal

Abstract

Anxiety is considered an emotional state and presents physiological and psychological components, involving feelings of fear, uncertainty and apprehensive anticipation, muscle tension and pain, shortness of breath, tremor and restlessness and various other discomforts. During postpartum anxiety appears as a common emotional state, being more prevalent in mothers with children hospitalized in neonatal intensive care units and mothers of newborn (NB) with congenital malformation (CM). The objective of the study was to evaluate the levels of anxiety of mothers of newborns with and without malformations admitted to the Neonatal Unit (NU). Comparative, descriptive and quantitative study realized in two public institutions of Fortaleza from November 2015 to March 2016. The sample consisted of 118 mothers and 123 newborns and was divided into two groups: Group 1 (G1) included 28 mothers of children born with congenital malformations admitted to the NU, Group 2 (G2) composed of 95 mothers of children without the diagnosis of CM and admitted to the NU. A sociodemographic questionnaire was applied by the researcher to describe the profile of the study participants and their babies and the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was used to assess the level of anxiety of mothers. Data were organized in Excel, version 2010, and later analyzed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0. Project was approved by the ethics committees of the participating institutions. Most mothers were between 19 and 29 years (59.3%), coming from Fortaleza (65.2%), had 6 to 10 years of education (56.8%), brown/black (88.1 %) and income from one to two minimum monthly wages (61.8%). Mothers of G1 showed moderate anxiety prevalent to STAI trait (92.8%) and high anxiety prevailed in STAI state (46.5%). For G2 scores were between percentiles 25-75 (moderate anxiety) to STAI trait anxiety and most of the mothers reported low anxiety (45.2%) to STAI state. Concerning the comparison means of the variables with the scores of STAI, all were statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05) compared to the anxiety-state score. For Pearson correlation between the scores of the scale and maternal and neonatal variables, G1 showed a statistically significant relationship between the variables number of births (p = 0.003) and pregnancy (p = 0.003) with state anxiety and between chronological age (p = 0.008) and days of hospitalization (p = 0.008) with the trait anxiety. For G2, between the number of births variables (p = 0.05), Apgar score in the first minute (p = 0.009) and Apgar score at five minutes (p = 0.01) with anxiety-state score. The groups showed differences between the scores according to the percentiles of STAI, and the prevailing high anxiety for the G1. It showed the difference between the groups in the state anxiety score with maternal and neonatal variables.