I am nearly 26 weeks pregnant and have been dealing with extreme stress as well as raised blood pressure and heart rate due to multiple family issues and a home purchase. These things have been going on for three or four months but have really blown up in the past two weeks, and I’m worried about the baby. I know increased cortisol levels aren’t good. Can increased stress over a prolonged period relate to preterm birth and low birth weight, and are there any studies that show how stress during pregnancy impacts children later in life?
—Stressed and scared
First of all, let me say how sorry I am that you are going through all of this during a time that should be a happy one.
Discussions of stress in pregnancy feel so complex. Telling people it would be better to have less stress may well be a source of more stress, and we have fairly limited solutions. Having said that, it is also not helpful to hide information.
In this light: there is some evidence that stress during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight, prematurity, and mental health diagnoses later in life. Our best evidence on this comes from a study in Sweden that looked at deaths of close relatives as a driver of stress. The researchers compared cases where there was a death of a close family member during pregnancy with those where there was a death shortly after birth. The idea in this comparison is that the two groups are relatively similar, with the only difference being the timing of the death.
The results suggest that the death of a close relative during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight by about 0.35% (so, about 3 in 1,000) and the chance of taking ADHD medication later in childhood by about 0.62% (6 in 1,000). These effects are significant and meaningful as a share of the baseline, though in absolute terms they are small.
It is hard to compare sources of stress, although the authors of this paper argue that their results may be applicable to other stressors.
It’s frustrating to give this information without some concrete advice. Stress, especially this kind of external stress, may be largely out of your control. Worrying about it is not likely to make it better, and could make it worse. Perhaps the best advice is to think about whether there are small changes you can make that might help how you feel. Ten minutes of meditation a day? Some online yoga? A massage?
Please take care of yourself.
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