Research has shown that stress can have harmful effects on a pregnancy. While this concept is widely accepted in the medical field, it can be difficult to measure. Recently, scientists were able to study a group of women who lived in or near the path of hurricanes. Researchers were able to look at these “stress events” and look at the health of the baby after childbirth.
The findings
The study found that mothers living within 30 kilometers of a hurricane’s path during their third trimester were 60 percent more likely to have a newborn with abnormal conditions.
“Probably the most important finding of our study is that it does seem like being subjected to stress in pregnancy has some negative effect on the baby, but that the effect is more subtle than some of the previous studies have suggested,” said Currie, who conducted the study along with Maya Rossin-Slater, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics at Columbia University.
The future
The study breaks ground by honing in on new — and potentially better — ways to measure the impact of prebirth stress on newborns and opens avenues for further research into the potential impact on such children’s later development.
“I think there’s every reason to believe that if you have a better measure of child health — like you knew this child was having breathing problems at birth — that might be a stronger predictor of longer-term outcomes,” Currie said. “There’s a lot of interest in this whole area of how things that happen very early in life can affect future outcomes.”
The new study included data on eight hurricanes and tropical storms that hit any part of Texas between 1996 and 2008 and caused more than $10 million damage
Future studies could explore other stress events, which could then be compared to these results.
