Digital Therapy Trial Led by King's College London Eases Pregnancy Anxiety

A new self-guided digital therapy could help stop anxiety from escalating during pregnancy, according to a randomised trial from King's College London published in JAMA Network Open. Anxiety disorders affect around one in five pregnant or birthing people, so a simple, scalable treatment could matter to thousands of families across the NHS.

The RELAX trial randomised 268 women who were 16 to 28 weeks pregnant, with 134 receiving the therapy plus usual care. The programme has 12 short online sessions over four weeks, each with 30 scenarios that train people to interpret ambiguous situations more positively. Anxiety fell significantly before and after birth, alongside lower depression and less repetitive negative thinking.

Engagement was strong, with 81.3 percent of the therapy group completing at least 10 of the 12 sessions. Funded by bodies including the NIHR and UKRI, the approach is now being developed into an app called LENS4Pregnancy. Researchers hope it can offer early help to women who report high worry but do not meet the threshold for a psychiatric diagnosis.