Postpartum depression may occur not only in the mother but also in spouses, which affects their quality of life, increases the social and family economic burden, and is not conducive to the growth and development of the child. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that influence its occurrence at an early stage.

To clarify the incidence of postpartum depression in Chinese maternal spouses through meta-analysis.

A computerized search was performed for cohort studies, case-control studies, and cross-sectional studies on the incidence of postpartum depression in Chinese maternal spouses in the databases of CNKI, Wanfang Data, VIP, CBM, PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, Embase, and Cochrane Library, with the time of search being from the establishment of the databases to March 2024. The search was conducted from the time of database construction to 2024-03-19. Two researchers independently screened the literature, and the included studies were subjected to data extraction, literature quality assessment, and meta-analysis by Stata 14.0 software.

39 papers were finally included, with a total sample size of 12 162 cases. Meta-analysis results showed that the prevalence of postpartum depression among maternal spouses in China was 14% (95%CI=12%-17%). The results of subgroup analysis showed that the incidence of postpartum depression in spouses was 17% (95%CI=13%-22%) within 1 month postpartum and 13% (95%CI=10%-15%) within 1 month-1 year postpartum; the incidence was 17% (95%CI=11%-23%) in inland areas and 13% (95%CI=11%-16%) in coastal regions; the measurement tool EPDS showed an incidence of 13% (95%CI=11%-16%) for spouses in studies using the EPDS and 18% (95%CI=10%-29%) for other study instruments; the incidence of postpartum depression was 15% (95%CI=11%-21%) for spouses of primiparous women and 14% (95%CI=11%-18%) for spouses of multiparous mothers. For the year of publication, the incidence was 16% (95%CI=10%-22%) for studies published from 2007 to 2016 and 14% (95%CI=12%-16%) for studies published from 2017 to 2023. Sensitivity analyses were performed by excluding literature one by one, and the combined effect sizes did not change significantly, suggesting that the meta-merged results were relatively robust. The distribution of each study point on both sides of the funnel plot was symmetrical, and the results of Egger's test showed t=1.79, P=0.082, suggesting that there was no significant publication bias.

The incidence of postpartum depression in Chinese maternal spouses is high, with an overall incidence of 14%, of which the incidence is as high as 17% within 1 month postpartum. Early screening and prevention should be emphasized.