TY - JOUR T1 - Desire to Avoid Pregnancy scale: clinical considerations and comparison with other questions about pregnancy preferences JF - BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health JO - BMJ Sex Reprod Health DO - 10.1136/bmjsrh-2022-201750 SP - bmjsrh-2022-201750 AU - Jennifer Anne Hall AU - Geraldine Barrett AU - Judith M Stephenson AU - Natalie Lois Edelman AU - Corinne Rocca Y1 - 2023/01/30 UR - http://jfprhc.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/29/bmjsrh-2022-201750.abstract N2 - Background Clinicians and women of reproductive age would benefit from a reliable way to identify who is likely to become pregnant in the next year, in order to direct health advice. The 14-item Desire to Avoid Pregnancy (DAP) scale is predictive of pregnancy; this paper compares it with other ways of assessing pregnancy preferences to shortlist options for clinical implementation.Methods A cohort of 994 UK women of reproductive age completed the DAP and other questions about pregnancy preferences, including the Attitude towards Potential Pregnancy Scale (APPS), at baseline and reported on pregnancies quarterly for a year. For each question, DAP item and combinations of DAP items, we examined the predictive ability, sensitivity, specificity, area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC), and positive and negative predictive values.Results The AUROCs and predictive ability of the APPS and DAP single items were weaker than the full DAP, though all except one had acceptable AUROCs (>0.7). The most predictive individual DAP item was ‘It would be a good thing for me if I became pregnant in the next 3 months’, where women who strongly agreed had a 66.7% chance of pregnancy within 12 months and the AUROC was acceptable (0.77).Conclusion We recommend exploring the acceptability to women and healthcare professionals of asking a single DAP item (‘It would be a good thing for me if I became pregnant in the next 3 months’), possibly in combination with additional DAP items. This will help to guide service provision to support reproductive preferences.Data are available in a public, open access repository. The dataset is available in the UCL Research Data Repository, doi 10.5522/04/21263007. ER -