Is pregnancy stress bad for your baby?

The build-up to Christmas may be full of party plans and ideas for the perfect gift for that special someone, but getting yourself organised to cook a Christmas roast à la Nigella, decorate the tree and wrap gifts for half your family and friends is no mean feat. Taking on these extra responsibilities and a change of routine makes it a stressful time for most people. And with the overhanging doom and gloom of the financial crisis and soaring food prices, this Christmas has the potential to be the most fraught we’ve all seen for a long time.

As well as taking all of this on board, you’re going through what is likely to be one of the biggest milestones in your life – you’re pregnant. So as well as the festive dilemmas other people are going through, you’re likely to be stressing about everything from what kind of birth will be best for you and when to start your maternity leave to which colour to paint the nursery.

But all this stress in pregnancy may be bad for your baby. Earlier this year newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, reported that antenatal stress can put your baby at risk of schizophrenia. This year has also seen papers such as the Daily Mail running headlines including ‘Pregnancy stress linked to asthma and allergies’ and ‘A stress-free pregnancy can deliver a popular child’. So what’s the truth?

Emotional problems

Scientists have spent the last decade looking at whether pregnancy stress affects your baby’s wellbeing. Experts are trying to pinpoint if being stressed in pregnancy can have an effect independent of other factors which are commonly linked with it, such as early delivery or postnatal stress.

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) involves 14,000 women who enrolled in the early 1990s when pregnant and their children. With detailed information on genetic, environmental and personal factors, it is hoped to help scientists shed light on all sorts of health problems, including the effect of stress in pregnancy. Professor Vivette Glover, an expert in the effects of stress in pregnancy at Imperial College, London, and her team studied information on almost 7500 of these women and their children. This showed strong associations between antenatal anxiety and behavioural and emotional problems in children as young as four years old.

‘Stress in pregnancy could be responsible for as many as 10-15% of all cases of emotional or behavioural problems, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,’ says Professor Glover. In the UK, this means stress in pregnancy could be responsible for up to 80,000 babies born every year going on to develop one of these conditions. Put in context, this means the chance of your baby growing up to have one of these problems increases from one in 20 to one in 10 if you are stressed in pregnancy.

‘It’s important to note that most children born to women who are stressed have double the risk, but most will be fine,’ says Professor Glover.

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Megan Faure is an occupational therapist and author of Baby Sense (£9.99, hippychick.com). ‘What isn’t taken into consideration with some of these findings is that stress is often reported in poorer socioeconomic groups who are already at risk; it’s not just stress affecting the baby but lots of other factors,’ she explains. ‘People need to put their stress in the context of other things happening in pregnancy. Often stress is outside of our control and there is no point getting stressed about being stressed.’

Dr Martin Ward Platt, consultant paediatrician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne agrees. ‘We can definitely say there’s an effect of pregnancy stress on the baby, but it’s small in the great scheme of things,’ he says. ‘If you compare it to high blood pressure, the impact is quite low.’

Some research in animals has implicated the hormone cortisol, which we all produce when we’re stressed, as the potential factor that could prevent development of the baby’s organs, particularly the brain. But translating animal research to humans is not straightforward and experts believe your placenta protects the baby from many hormonal fluxes.

‘The placenta is effectively a buffer zone,’ says Dr Ward Platt. ‘People have worried about cortisol levels but it’s hard to know if the negative effects of stress are as a direct effect of this hormone, some other factors produced in stress that we don’t know about or whether they’re down to other things going on such as high blood pressure.’

Are you stressed?

Even working out what stress actually is can be difficult. There is no precise definition so while a bad day at work may leave you feeling ‘stressed out’, so could worrying about your finances or suffering a bereavement in the family.

‘Stress happens in pregnancy because life continues to happen,’ says Dr Ward Platt. ‘Whenever we get a hike in mortgage rates and a slow-down in the economy people do have money worries and that impacts on stress. It’s amazing how many people move house during late pregnancy and moving house ranks high up there for stress.’

When Laura, 30, became pregnant with her daughter Lily, 16 months, she and her husband Andreas decided to move across London to a new home. The problem was, the deal wasn’t completed until two months before her due date, and the property needed a complete overhaul. ‘We loved the flat but it was like a 1960s show home,’ she says. ‘Every weekend we had to traipse across London to check on the builders and make decisions. I was getting twitchy, wanting to prepare for the baby instead of choosing where to put power points. But the overwhelming feeling was tiredness. I have a very stressful job as a solicitor and commuting to and from work every day, then going to see the house at the weekend was too much.’

At 36 weeks pregnant, Laura started her maternity leave and moved into her new house. Even then the house wasn’t ready and she had to spend time in her family home in Sheffield or share the house, which still had no doors, with a team of rowdy builders. ‘How the stress could affect my baby was in my mind, but I also felt sorry for myself because I thought I should be busy nesting rather than dealing with all the problems.’

However, the most stressful problem was registering with a new GP and a hospital to give birth at, says Laura. ‘I did get tearful and upset about ringing the hospital repeatedly when I was 38 weeks pregnant. I didn’t feel like anyone was willing to sort it out.’ When Laura eventually got an appointment at the hospital she was a week overdue and booked in for an induction, but went into labour naturally. ‘Before Lily was born I was quite hung up on getting everything in the house finished, but once she was born I realised that matching skirting boards didn’t matter too much.’

Coping mechanisms

Even if you’ve had the week from hell that makes the thought of a five-day labour seem like a piece of cake, there’s no need to worry about the effects of stress on your baby on top of this. Remember that no matter how tough things seem, you’ve undoubtedly got through bad times before and will again.
‘We’re built with a lot of defences and resilience,’ says Dr Wade Platt. ‘There’s a tendency in media stories to sensationalise. This makes us divert from all the good things we have, our defences to get through life’s events and come out the other side.’
‘Women should look after themselves in pregnancy and take time out to relax,’ says Professor Glover. ‘The other thing that has been shown to help is talking to people. We know having a supportive network is helpful, and may partly explain why having problems with a partner can affect outcomes.’

After the birth

But if you feel things have got on top of you during pregnancy, there are ways you can protect your baby against any side effects of this once she is born, says Megan. ‘Even when infants have a start in life that isn’t optimal there are protective factors,’ she says. ‘They come into play once a baby has been born.’ These factors include good interactions between you and your newborn, involvement of the father and a larger support network, claims Megan.

‘We’ve found that the quality of mothering and secure attachment after birth reduces the effect of stress in pregnancy,’ says Professor Glover.
So worrying about life’s stresses and strains is best avoided. If anything, it will stop you enjoying your pregnancy bloom. But don’t worry about being worried. Even if you feel as though your world has fallen apart during your pregnancy, having a baby is a great way to start afresh and bonding with your baby will make a big difference – to you both.