Just relax! Mom’s stress is linked to baby’s health.

Tegethoff, M, N Greene, J Olsen, E Schaffner and G Meinlschmidt. 2011. Stress during pregnancy and offspring pediatric disease: a national cohort study. Environmental Health Perspectives http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1003253.

A mother’s level of everyday stress during pregnancy may influence the health of her child for years to come, a large study from Denmark suggests.

The study is one of the first to consider daily stress as a health predictor in people and may provide another approach to reduce disease in children.

Everyday stress included both life stress and emotional stress. Life stress was determined by how burdened the woman felt by her work, home situation and relationships with other people, while emotional stress covers feelings like anxiety, nervousness and depression.

The results suggest that children whose moms had higher levels of life duty stress during pregnancy were more likely to have a wide variety of diseases during childhood, from infections and respiratory problems to mental health and behavioral problems. Emotional stress was associated with fewer effects.

Much research has focused on how a mother’s diet or chemical exposures during pregnancy can affect children’s health later in life. Evidence suggests they can affect a baby's health in subtle ways, often programming the child before birth for health advantages and disadvantages that can last a lifetime.

Researchers have long suspected that stress during pregnancy may affect children’s development. Women who were pregnant during major disasters – such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 – or women who have suffered the death of a close relative or partner while pregnant have been shown to have babies with more health problems, ranging from behavioral disorders to asthma.

However, it is unclear whether stress associated with everyday events can impact children’s development in the same way as stress from a major disaster.

For this study, researchers collected data on more than 60,000 mothers in Denmark who gave birth between 1996 and 2003. The researchers interviewed women over the telephone during the third trimester and again at six months postpartum to gauge the stress levels in the women’s lives. The researchers compared the two to evaluate whether maternal stress before or after birth was associated with health outcomes.

The researchers also collected information on other factors that might influence a child’s health, such as maternal smoking and health complications during pregnancy.  After the children were born, they examined medical records to look for disease early in the child’s life. Most children were followed until they were at least seven years old.

The researchers found that there was actually little overlap between life stress and emotional stress in the women studied.

Life stress was associated with an increased risk of having any disease in early childhood. In particular, life stress was associated with increased risk of serious infections in childhood and mental health and behavioral disorders, as well as other conditions affecting eye, ear, skin and digestive health.

Once the researchers took into account maternal life stress after birth, the association between stress and mental health and behavioral disorders in early childhood was less strong. This indicates that stressful conditions during the early years of life may have more to do with these conditions than stress before birth. These effects are difficult to separate.

The investigators found fewer effects of emotional stress. High levels of emotional stress were associated with an increased risk of serious infections in childhood, but surprisingly very high levels of emotional stress seemed to protect children against some diseases like problems with the eyes and metabolic disorders.

Controlling stress during pregnancy and early childhood may be another effective approach to lower children's illness and disease, the researchers note.

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