Stress during Pregnancy Escalates Risk of Stillbirth

If you are pregnant and feeling the blues, it's time to cheer up, since according to a new study, a stressful pregnancy ends up in poor birth outcomes.

The study, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that going through any kind of stressful event - financial, emotional or personal - increases the risk of stillbirth.

Stillbirth is the death of a fetus inside the uterus after 20 weeks of pregnancy.  According to the 'still born still loved' organization, every year nearly three million babies are stillborn across the world and 28,000 in the United States.

For the current National Institutes of Health study, researchers interviewed more than 2,000 women. Almost all the participants reported going through some kind of stressful event during their pregnancy. However, of the total participants, about one in five from the stillbirth group had five or more stressful events in pregnancy, compared to one in 10 women from the live birth group.

Researchers found the risk of stillbirth going up dramatically with an increase in the number of stressful events in a pregnant woman's life. According to them, women with five or more stressful events after conceiving are at a 2.5-time higher risk of experiencing stillbirth compared to women who do not come across any stressful event in their pregnancy.

Black women had the highest number of stressful events compared to white or Hispanic women.

"At prenatal visits, screening is common for concerns such as intimate partner violence and depression, but the questions in our study were much more detailed," co-author Uma Reddy said in a news release. "This is a first step toward cataloguing the effects of stress on the likelihood of stillbirth and, more generally, toward documenting how pregnancy influences a woman's mental health and how pregnancy is influenced by a woman's mental health."

Apart from stress, many previous studies have shown many other factors that increase the risks of stillbirth; delayed motherhood (pregnancy after 40 years) and the habit of sleeping on one's back after conceiving are some of them.