If you feel overwhelmed or have a bad personal time, you will be extremely worried about how your nervous situation and your anxiety can affect the little one inside you. The worst part is that this also intensifies stress. Stress from stress ... the fish that bites its tail. Let's start by calming down and seek help to calm down. But let's talk clearly and keep an eye on the data.
Today numerous studies have been aimed at evaluating stress in pregnancy and its consequences. However, Exactly what is stress? Does it affect all women equally? Is it known at what stage the woman and the child are most vulnerable to suffer its effects?
In these posts we will try to answer these and other questions by reviewing the latest research in this field.
Knowing the stress
The concept of stress has evolved in recent decades. It is currently accepted that it is a auto answer of our body to adapt to certain situations.
The human being is continually adapting himself to a changing environment. During that process, a interaction between the demands of the situation and the activation of the individual's resources to adapt to it.
According to that, a moderate level of stress is something natural and adaptive. So, When would it be harmful?
When stress is maintained over time with a certain degree of intensity it can cause damage both physical and mental health. For example, several studies have shown their influence on the function of immune system and in the beginning and evolution of depressive disorders.
In addition, it has been shown that people suffering from stress are easier to carry out unhealthy behaviors, such as sleeping poorly and poorly, eating poorly, exercising poorly, or abusing alcohol, tobacco or other drugs.
Some life situations may favor the appearance of stress. In the case of pregnancy, there are some moments that can be a source of concern for the mother, such as the different medical tests to which she has to undergo and waiting for her results, fears for childbirth, for the possibility that the baby suffer some damage, for bodily changes, etc.
All these concerns are normal and you don't have to feel guilty about having them. Are the high levels of stress during pregnancy or prolonged stress caused, for example, by the experience of a traumatic event, strong labor pressure, rejection of the couple or lack of support, which has been seen that can affect both the mother and the future baby.
Biology and stress
In stress situations maintained Over time, the body reacts by secreting high concentrations of hormones, including catecholamines (adrenalin Y norepinephrine) and the cortisol. The excessive duration of this state has detrimental effects.
Thus, it has been seen that high concentrations of cortisol for a long time they can cause alterations in the immune system, memory, blood pressure, circulating glucose, fertility, or loss of bone mass, among others.
It has also been observed that they can detrimentally influence our body other hormones released during periods of stress, such as growth hormone, prolactin and opioid peptides.
Effects of stress on pregnancy
Most research focused on studying the effects of stress in pregnancy agrees that when stress it accumulates and reaches a high degree can have harmful effects on the future baby. But let's take a look at those studies.
Although in the beginning most of them focused on studying the consequences of suffering highly stressful punctual experiences During pregnancy, such as the death of a loved one or a natural disaster, little by little other chronic stressors were taken into account, such as abuse in the couple, work stress, economic problems or lack of social support.
To measure the influence of these factors are often used questionnaires that have proven their reliability and validity or physiological stress response measures, such as the level of cortisol in the blood or saliva or changes in blood pressure and heart rate.
You have to keep in mind that what matters is how stressful the mother perceives the situation, more than the intensity of the event.
Some of the effects that have been associated with a intense Stress during pregnancy are as follows:
- Obstetric complications, premature delivery and low birth weight. This association could be explained by the negative effects of hormones released during stress, although the mechanisms involved are not yet clear. Even so, in all studies, most women had a full-term pregnancy, despite reporting high levels of stress.
- Spontaneous abortion: Some studies have shown an association between the death of a loved one during the first weeks of pregnancy and an increased risk of miscarriage. For example, in an investigation carried out by the University of Michigan it was seen that the body recognizes the levels of hydrocortisone, a stress-generated hormone, as an alarm signal and as a symptom that conditions are not favorable for a pregnancy.
- Problems in intellectual development: It has also been seen that sometimes high doses of stress during pregnancy can cause problems in intellectual and cognitive development. You will ask And how can this be known? I give you an example of a study published in 2004 that evaluated the intellectual and language development of 89 children aged 5 to 12, whose mothers had been pregnant during a snowstorm in Quebec that left millions of people without power for six weeks The authors found that language development and verbal intellectual quotient tended to be lower in the children of women who had suffered the most stress during the storm, although all children were within the normal range. The results suggest that prenatal stress would have long-term effects on the baby's brain structures, especially those related to language and verbal skills.
- Emotional and behavioral problems in the baby. Some studies have found a slight association between maternal stress and attention problems and hyperactivity in the child. For example, in a study published in 2002 in the journal of Psychiatry The authors of London found that the children of those mothers who had reported more anxiety during pregnancy had more emotional, attention and hyperactivity problems. But nevertheless, other studies are not so conclusive. In fact, in a review of articles carried out in 2003 by the Department of Clinical Medicine of the Aarhus University of Denmark, the authors found methodological limitations in several of these investigations and emphasized the importance of taking these data as indicative.
Despite these data, it is clear that more research is needed to study the consequences of stress during pregnancy. Futures prospective studies they should use physiological and psychological measures at pre and postnatal period to better understand the function of the endocrine axis of the mother and her child.
Meanwhile and considering that we all feel stress at many times we can learn to step on the brake when we notice that a situation begins to overflow. In future posts we will talk about the main symptoms of stress, how to prevent it and how to keep it at bay.
In Babies and more | Cortisol resulting from stress affects the baby's brain development during pregnancy. The mother's work stress predisposes to low birth weight. Photos | jj.figueroa, gabi_menashe, on Flickr.
