According to the UK’s National Health Service, excessive nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), affects between 1 and 3 in every 100 pregnant women. Due to its severe symptoms, HG can result in significant weight loss, dehydration and electrolyte imbalance, which can severely impact quality of life, with studies showing that women with HG had increased risk of anxiety and depression.
Previous studies of the condition were either conducted within small or single-country cohorts, or had limited focus on other neuropsychiatric and mental health outcomes. In research published in September 2025 in The Lancet, Hamilton Morrin and colleagues conducted a large-scale, multinational analysis of clinical data to assess incidence of 24 neuropsychiatric, metabolic and mental health outcomes during the first year following an HG diagnosis. The study found that significant risks were found for 18 of the 24 outcomes, which included women with HG having a 2.7 times higher risk of postpartum depression and a 2.06 times higher risk of eating disorders compared to women without HG.
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The study utilised data from the TriNetX Global Collaborative Network, which contains electronic healthcare record data of more than 150 million patients derived from 140 healthcare organisations within 18 high-income and middle-income countries. Women identified as pregnant from 1 January 2010 onwards who were diagnosed with HG using the International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition (ICD-10) codes before 11 April 2025 were eligible for inclusion. Women identified as pregnant without HG within the same timeframe were established as the control group. Diagnosis of 24 neuropsychiatric, metabolic and mental health outcomes within 1 to 365 days of the HG diagnosis were identified. Patients with a history of an identified outcome before HG diagnosis were excluded from analysis. In total, 492,371 women with HG were included in the study, with 4,990,712 women without HG in the control group.
After matching HG cases and controls together based on their baseline characteristics, the HG and control cohorts contained 476,857 women each. When risks of the 24 outcomes were compared, women with HG had an more than 2 times higher risk of developing five of the outcomes compared to women without HG, including postpartum depression (2.7 times higher) refeeding syndrome (2.5 times higher), Wernicke’s encephalopathy (2.3 times higher), eating disorders (2.06 times higher) and depression (2.03 times higher). Women with HG also had a 2.23 times higher risk of being prescribed antipsychotics compared to those without HG.
The study by Morrin and colleagues illustrates the impact HG has on both metabolic and mental health. It illustrates the importance of providing both physical and mental health support for patients with HG, in particular to address their vulnerability to those outcomes. GlobalData epidemiologists forecast that in the sixteen major markets: (16MM: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, the UK and the US), total prevalent cases of anorexia nervosa (an eating disorder) in women aged 18 and above will increase from 22.5 million cases in 2025 to 24 million cases in 2034.
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By GlobalData