Anxiety concerning fetal malformations in pregnant women exposed or not exposed to an antenatal serum alpha-fetoprotein screening program.

Individual degrees of anxiety concerning fetal malformations were assessed in early, mid- and late pregnancy by means of self-rating on visual analogue scales. Two samples of women were compared, i.e., 699 women living in an area with a well-established serum alpha-fetoprotein screening program and 239 women living in an area where such a program had never been in operation. At the beginning of pregnancy the distribution of the individual degrees of anxiety were found to be similar in both samples of women. However, in mid- and late pregnancy the anxiety in women from the screening area was found to be lower than the anxiety in women from nonscreened areas.