Mental Health before Pregnancy Important: Preconception Stress may Lead to Infant Mortality

For those women planning to become a mom, here is an important bit of advice: stay happy and keep away from all kinds of stressful events. According to new research, the mental status of a woman before conception is crucial for having a healthy baby. Babies of women who experience a stressful event before conception are at higher risks of dying before their first birthday.

Scores of studies have shown how important it is to have a healthy mental environment during and after pregnancy, to avoid adverse health outcomes. However, there hardly exists any concrete data to highlight the negative impact of exposure to stress during the preconception period.

To reach a conclusion, a team of researchers from Indiana University and Karolinska Institute in Sweden looked at more than 3 million (3,055,361) babies born in Sweden between 1973 and 2008. The preconception period was taken to be six months before conception. Researchers collected information about the participants who had to cope with the death of a close family member during the preconception period.

Nearly 20,651 women had been exposed to at least one stressful event before pregnancy and 26,731 after conceiving. Of the total children, nearly 8,400 babies died in their first year of birth. A closer look showed that about 93 babies who died in the first year were born to mothers who reported preconception stress, Livescience.com reported.

Mothers with a history of preconception stress had given birth to either premature or low birth weight babies. Findings reported in the journal Psychological Science saw a 53 percent increased risk of infant mortality associated with preconception stress. Exposure to severe stress before conception leads to drastic changes in the system of the body, further interfering with the body's ability to transfer the required amount of nutrition for the fetus' growth, LiveScience.com reported.

However, the researchers couldn't find any link between infant mortality and antenatal stress.

"These results suggest that the period immediately before conception may be a sensitive developmental period with ramifications for infant mortality risk," the authors wrote.

The results come at a time when infant mortality rates in the U.S. have declined slightly (6 in 1,000 children in 2011) compared to the past (6.9 per 1,000 in 2005). According to CDC, nearly 25,000 infants die every year mainly due to birth defects, SIDS, pregnancy-related complications or premature birth.