A new study shows that it’s not just the stress that you have during pregnancy that affects your baby’s development: stressors that have happened over the course of your lifetime can affect your unborn child too!

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in conjunction with colleagues from Harvard School of Public Health have shown that interpersonal trauma may actually affect the development of a baby’s immune system. These astonishing findings are published online by the Journal Of Allergy & Clinical Immunology.

Senior study author, Rosalind J. Wright, said that this research built on a previous study that showed a link between psychological stress and both allergies and asthma. The current study took that research a step further and looked at how stress occurring at various stages of a woman’s life can later affect gestational development, right down to the development of allergy and asthma in her baby.

The study recruited almost 480 pregnant women aged 18 and older from the inner city area of Boston. Study participants were then asked about interpersonal trauma during their lives, from either childhood through the teen years, or in adulthood and pregnancy. Researchers also looked at whether stress was chronic in either of the two stages of life.

The interpersonal stressors that the researchers looked for were severe in nature: being pushed, grabbed, shoved, kicked, bit, punched, hit with an object that hurt them, choked, burned, forced to engage in sexual activities or physically attacked in some other form.

Placental cord blood was collected from the babies of these mothers at birth and checked for IgE. IgE stands for immunoglobulin, a type of antibody which plays a critical role in allergies. Ideally, this antibody should be only found in low levels. If it is found in high levels, it can be sign of the immune system shifting towards allergic reactions.

Researchers discovered that children of mothers who had severe interpersonal trauma in their pre-adult life had babies with high levels of IgE. The significant factor seemed to be trauma in early life rather than trauma in adulthood.

Wright commented that the study showed that interpersonal stress was an issue not just for women’s health but “to the health of the next generation [which] further underscores the need to prevent such trauma.”

Source: EmaxHealth