Another study shows the importance of learning how to moderate or eliminate stressful anxiety. Particularly for pregnant women, anxiety affects future generations in a profound and direct way. I highly recommend Rapid Eye Technology and Emotional Freedom Technique for anxiety. Most of my clients were surprised to find how easy and fast they could eliminate irrational fears and anxieties of many sorts. Chronic anxiety can also be quickly and effectively dealt with by a competent hypnotherapist. If you or someone you know is pregnant and under anxiety stress, please, help her and her unborn child by convincing the mother-to-be to seek out and obtain competent relief from her anxiety and stress.
A British study presented in Berlin at the Annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society (ERS), finds that pregnant women who are stressed, particularly late in pregnancy, have an increased risk of their child going on to develop asthma. Very anxious pregnant women are 65% more likely to have a child who later develops asthma than mothers with a lower level of anxiety.
Two studies have recently demonstrated a connection between anxiety in those close to the child (such as the mother, or, in some cases, the child’s social worker) and early onset of wheezing. But both of those studies only examined the post-natal period.
Experiments with adult mammals exposed to in-utero stress have shown that the subjects demonstrated changes both in the hypothalamo-hypophysary axis (which controls the hormones connected with major functions of the body) and in the immune system. These shifts made them more vulnerable to inflammation of the airways and bronchial hyperreactivity.
Noting that no comparable data existed for humans, Raquel Granell (Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK) and her team conducted a major prospective study on the subject – monitoring over 5,800 families for eight years.
“Our first hypothesis was that maternal stress in pregnancy was associated with pediatric asthma. The second was that this effect was not mediated by an allergic mechanism and would be stronger in non-atopic children than in their atopic counterparts”, Granell explained in Berlin. The results presented to the Congress provide a striking confirmation of the first of the British team’s hypotheses.
In order to analyze the effect of antenatal psychological factors on asthma, the Bristol researchers studied subjects from ALSPAC (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), a cohort of pregnant women living in the former county of Avon, who were due to give birth between 1 April 1991 and 31 December 1992.
ALSPAC, which has already led to a number of publications on various issues, sought primarily to identify the role of genetic and environmental factors on child development. It covered a total of more than 14,000 families. Granell analyzed data from 5,810 mothers with children for whom the data needed for her study were available.
Maternal anxiety was assessed by self-completion questionnaires that the mothers filled in at 18 and 32 weeks of pregnancy. On the basis of the responses, the researchers were able to divide the women into four groups with different levels of anxiety. Their children were assessed for asthma at the age of approximately 7.5 years, likewise by means of questionnaires completed by the mothers.
At the clinical level, bronchial hyperreactivity was also tested for when the children reached age eight, and skin prick tests were used to see whether a subject’s asthma was of allergic origin and to which allergens the child reacted.
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Almost 13% of the children were found to have asthma. As expected, the authors confirmed a strong connection between maternal anxiety at 18 and, particularly, 32 weeks of pregnancy, and asthma in children aged 7.5 years. The asthma risk was found to be 17% higher for children born to mothers who were stressed at 32 weeks, and 14% higher where the mother was stressed at 18 weeks, Granell told the Congress.
Severe anxiety multiplies the asthma risk
The results were even more striking for women belonging to the most anxious group: the additional risk of asthma in the child could reach 65% for those in the highest-stress group at 32 weeks and 53% for those severely stressed at 18 weeks. These relative increases in the risk of asthma are slightly mitigated when all other relevant factors are eliminated, but, as the authors emphasized, they remain significant.
Granell and her team also pointed out that they had not identified any bias arising from the use of self-completion questionnaires (although anxious mothers are likely to report more symptoms). They also found evidence that families with whom contact was lost had slightly higher anxiety levels, so the findings presented at the Congress might even represent an underestimate of the overall effect. On the other hand, Granell concedes, the mothers’ stress was not directly measured by the medical team, and there is no way of knowing whether their state of anxiety was transient or chronic.
However, analysis of a small sample of the cohort by other researchers had found a correlation between maternal anxiety during pregnancy and disrupted cortisol secretion in children aged ten. So, as the British team reported in Berlin, bronchial hyperreactivity and asthma in children whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy seem more likely to be connected with hormonal imbalances in the hypothalamo-hypophysary axis than with an allergic mechanism.
The work presented to the ERS Annual Congress is an important milestone. This is the first prospective study on humans to examine a link between child asthma and maternal prenatal anxiety, a relationship which appears to be dose-responsive, with the probability of asthma increasing in proportion to the level of anxiety in the mother.