Procedure

All patients were recruited from Shenzhen Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital and Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital. We used the Chinese version of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) in the clinic for primary screening.⁴² Those who scored over 7 and were diagnosed with PPD were introduced by their doctors to our researchers. After preliminary introduction of this program through the mobile phone, the researchers invited the patients for a face-to-face interview. All interviews were launched in a quiet and dedicated room.

First, the researcher explained the program in detail to the interviewee in a one-to-one setting and determined if the interviewee met all the inclusion criteria and did not meet the exclusion criteria. If all conditions were met, the researcher used the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS17) to assess depressive symptoms and asked the interviewee whether she was willing to participate.⁴³

All volunteers signed written informed consent. The course of acupuncture treatment was 8 weeks, with 16 sections in total. All subjects were assessed at baseline, week 1, week 2, week 4 and week 8 during the treatment. The blood samples were collected before and after the 8 weeks acupuncture treatment. Participants were not compensated for study participation (Figure 1).

Trial flow diagram.