Word: stressful
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Severe emotional stress during the first delicate months of a woman's pregnancy may permanently impair the neurodevelopment of her unborn child, leading to an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, new research suggests...
...link between maternal stress and fetal development is not new: A study in the Lancet in 2000 suggested, for example, that a mother's stress during pregnancy may increase the risk of congenital brain malformations in her baby. And it has been well established that severe maternal stress is associated with low birth weight and premature birth. Now, a new study by British and Danish researchers in this week's Archives of General Psychiatry examines the impact of stress - the acute, agonizing kind, such as that experienced with death or sickness in the mother's immediate family...
...group consisted of 1.38 million births recorded in Denmark, from 1973 to 1995. Children were followed from age 10 until their death, their departure from Denmark, the onset of schizophrenia or the end of the study period in 2005. Researchers determined also whether the birth mothers had suffered extreme stress - due either to the death or illness (heart attack, cancer or stroke) of a first-degree relative - six months prior to and at any time during pregnancy. The data showed that women who experienced a close family member's death during the first three months of pregnancy...
...severity of maternal stress matters, then one would expect the death of child to cause more injury than the death of a parent. Indeed, says Abel, her data hinted at such a response - compared with women who lost a parent, those who lost a child appeared to have a higher likelihood of giving birth to a child at risk for schizophrenia - but her sample size was too small to confirm the theory...
...mother's emotional stress impacts her fetus's growth is still mostly a mystery. It's possible that increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol interfere directly with fetal development. Or it may be that the mother's stress response triggers a cascade of other chemical changes - in her immune system, in blood levels of sex hormones, or perhaps in cell-signaling proteins called cytokines - that may indirectly affect early fetal development. Whatever the exact mechanism, its effects lend credence to the theory that starting early in pregnancy, "mothers transmit information to their fetus about what condition they're likely...