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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO173

Somatic distress and physical health in women following perinatal loss: a quantitative study from wartime Ukraine

SOMATIC DISTRESS AND PHYSICAL HEALTH IN WOMEN AFTER PERINATAL LOSS: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY FROM WARTIME UKRAINE

High or very high somatic symptom burden was identified in 61.2% of women who had experienced perinatal loss, and this burden showed moderate to strong associations with indicators of grief, posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and depression.

The study aimed to examine the severity of somatic distress, physical health status, and the relationships between somatic symptoms and indicators of psychological distress in women following perinatal loss. A cross-sectional online study was conducted between August 2023 and October 2025 with 67 Ukrainian women who had experienced perinatal loss; their mean age was 33.7 years. Somatic distress was measured using the Somatic Symptom Scale-8 (SSS-8), and associations were analyzed using Spearman rank correlations. The distribution of losses by timing was 26.9% at or before 12 weeks (n=18), 9.0% between 12 and 22 weeks (n=6), 38.8% between 22 and 42 weeks (n=26), 3.0% during childbirth (n=2), and 22.4% during the neonatal period, from 0 to 28 days (n=15); 65.7% of participants were assessed within two years of their loss. The mean SSS-8 score was 15.49 ± 7.20 (median 16.0), corresponding to moderate somatic distress; the severity distribution was none or minimal in 7.5% (n=5), low in 11.9% (n=8), moderate in 19.4% (n=13), high in 20.9% (n=14), and very high in 40.3% (n=27), meaning that 61.2% of women (n=41) had a high or very high burden. Following the loss, 32.4% of women (n=22) sought medical help for physical complaints, and 39.7% (n=27) received a diagnosis of a new or exacerbated chronic illness; among the 46.3% who considered their social support inadequate, the median SSS-8 score was 19.0, compared with 12.5 in the other participants (p<0.001). Moderate to strong positive correlations were found between SSS-8 scores and indicators of psychological distress: anxiety and depression, PHQ-4 ρ=0.603; perinatal grief, PGS ρ=0.557; posttraumatic stress, PCL-5 ρ=0.557; grief cognitions, GCQ ρ=0.498; avoidance, DAAPGQ ρ=0.491; and prolonged grief symptoms, TGI-SR+ ρ=0.484 (all p<0.001). The association with coping self-efficacy, SCES+, was strong and inverse (ρ=0.631 in the negative direction, p<0.001). The authors state that perinatal loss carries a substantial somatic burden closely associated with psychological distress, that an integrated medical and psychological approach is needed, and that routine somatic screening using validated tools such as the SSS-8 would be appropriate, particularly in conflict settings; they emphasize that the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference.

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