Stress: Impact on the Fetus
Please note that these are my personal notes from my readings. The following studies examine the effects of extreme stress on the fetus and its later life. Extreme events cut through the many complications of studying the impact of general stress on pregnant women and their offspring. Extreme events — like war, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes — affect everyone in a given community, the troubled and the psychologically healthy. They happen within an indentifiable period of time, which can be matched up with pregnant women’s gestational stage. They they end, creating a discrete experience rather than an ongoing state of existence. Such circumstances make unexpected events the next best thing to a traditional scientific experiment, in which subjects can be randomly assigned to one condition or another. (From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul)
Severe Stress Earlier in Pregnancy May Lead to Earlier Delivery
From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul, pages 48 – 49:
Curt Sandman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine studies the impact of stress during pregnancy. On January 17, 1994, an earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, hit Northridge, California. It killed 57 people and injured nearly 12,000 others.
At the time of the Northridge earthquake, Sandman was already tracking a group of pregnant women to learn more about how stressful life events affected birth outcomes. From this pool of subjects, he identified forty women who had experienced the earthquake at close hand. “The value of this set of circumstances was that we had assessed the women’s psychological functioning before the earthquake, and that the earthquake itself was an event experienced by all these women at exactly the same moment,” Sandman says.
Sandman found that women who were in their first trimester when they experienced the earthquake delivered their babies two weeks early on average — twice as early as women who were in their third trimester when the earthquake hit. Women who did not experience the earthquake during pregnancy, a group included in the study as a control, had the longest gestations of all. “There seems to be a critical period during pregnancy during which the woman is most susceptible to stress. The earlier in pregnancy the earthquake occurred, the earlier the delivery.”
Severe Stress Earlier in Pregnancy May Lead to Lower Birth Weight
From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul, pages 49 – 50:
Sandman’s study adds to a body of research that indicates that extremely stressful events can affect pregnancy outcomes. Like Sandman, a number of scientists have found that severe stress is associated with a higher risk of early delivery, or of having a baby with low birth weight. Pierre Buekens, dean of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in Louisiana, examined the birth outcomes of 301 pregnant women living in New Orleans and Baton Rouge when these cities were struck by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Buekens and his coauthors found that women who’d had three or more “severe hurricane experinces,” such as walking through floodwaters, sustaining significant home damage, or going without electricity for more than a week, were at a “markedly increased risk” of delivering low birth weight and preterm infants. A far larger study, carried out in Denmark, examined the records of more than one million women who gave birth over a twenty-found-year period. Women who had experienced the death or serious illness of a relative during or just before pregnancy were 16% more likely to deliver prematurely; when it was one of their own children who had died or become ill, the incidence of premature delivery increased by 23%.
To be clear: these are not everyday hassles we’re talking about, the wear and tear of ordinary life. Extreme stress is produced by events that threaten one’s life or the lives of loved ones: the sudden death of a close family member, the diagnosis of a terminal disease, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack — or the experience of war.
Extreme Stress May Increase The Manifestation of Schizophrenia and Behavior Disorders in Fetuses
From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul, pages 50 – 52:
The Winter War of 1939
Some of the earliest scientific studies of the effect of extreme stress on the fetus had its roots in a conflict known as the Winter War of 1939. In November of that year, 3 months after the start of WWII, the Soviet Union invaded the small nation of Finland. The Soviet forces outnumbered the Finns four to one, but the Finnish troops’ fierce determination and skillful fighting in freezing conditions held off the invaders for 3.5 months. By the time it finally surrendered, Finland had lost 25,000 soldiers, many of them with young wives and small children.
Nearly four decades later, Matti Huttunen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Helsinki, decided to look into the fate of children whose fathers had been killed. With a colleague, Pekka Niskanen, he identified 167 children whose fathers died while they were still in the womb, and compared them to 168 children whose fathers died during their first year of life. (Some of the fathers in their study died from causes other than the war.) He found significantly more cases of schizophrenia and behavior disorders among individuals who had lost their fathers prenatally — perhaps, he conjectured, because they had been affected during gestation by their mothers’ grief.
Those Born During the Arab-Israeli Six Day War
One researcher who has followed Huttunen’s lead is Delores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry and environmental medicine at New York University. Malaspina examined the health records of almost eighty-nine thousand people born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976. She found that the offspring of women who were in their second month of pregnancy during June 1967, the time of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, were significantly more likely to develop schizophrenia as young adults. The effect varied by sex: females whose second month in the womb coincided with the conflict were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than females gestated at other times, while males were 1.2 times more likely. Malaspina theorizes that these individuals’ neurological development in utero was disrupted by stress hormones generated by their mothers’ bodies in response to the war, and that the second month of pregnancy is a period of particular vulnerability.
On January 6, 1988, Canada Suffered an Ice Storm That Was The Worst Natural Disaster in the Country’s History
From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul, pages 53 – 55:
One person caught in the ice storm was Suzanne King, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. King’s psychiatric research focuses on risk factors for schizophrenia. During the ice storm, she wondered: What is this doing to pregnant women and their fetuses?
King initiated Project Ice Storm, following more than 150 women who had been pregnant during the storm. Their earliest results showed that the more stressful events pregnant women encountered during the disaster, the lower were their babies’ birth weights. Evaluations performed when the offspring were two years old revealed an association between prenatal stress and cognitive and language skills: the more severe the stressful events experienced during pregnancy, the poorer were their toddlers’ abilities. A third round of tests performed when the children were five and half showed continued cognitive and language delays, as well as increased rates of attention and behavior problems, among children whose mothers endured high levels of hardship during the ice storm.
Now ten years old, the children of women who encountered great adversity during the ice storm have displayed differences at every stage from kids whose mothers had an easier time…
After following these children for more than a decade, King says, “I have a lot more respect for the impressionability of the fetus. Historically, people knew that it was a good idea to take special care of pregnant women. But in modern times, we’ve forgotten that.” Especially in crisis situations, she says, “we need to see pregnant women and their fetuses as high priority.”
