Maternal and Pediatric Nutrition
Open Access

Stress which Women’s go through during Pregnancy

Swati Jain^{* *}Correspondence: Swati Jain, B tech, Department of Electrical and electronics, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India, Tel: +919951416655, Email:

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Prenatal stress (or prenatal maternal stress) is that the exposure of an expectant mother to distress, which may be caused by stressful life events or by environmental hardships. Since past, scientists have written about beliefs that the spirit of the pregnant mother may affect her unborn child.

For instance, maternal consumption of essential fatty acids during pregnancy is linked to lower birth weight and decrements in cognitive and motor function, while fetal exposure to PCBs and methylmercury, via seafood in women’s diet, is linked to neurocognitive deficits.

High stress levels during pregnancy can affect the organogenesis and therefore the foetus’ central systema nervosum maturation. There is a consensus within the literature on the relevance of the primary 1,000 days since conception within the development of a child's cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

Prenatal stress and negative mood during pregnancy has been shown to extend the danger for poor childbirth outcomes and postnatal maternal mood problems. Additionally, prenatal distress can interfere with the mother-infant attachment and child development outcomes. Despite the clear association between prenatal stress and child outcomes, frequently women don't receive screening, prevention, or treatment for mood or stress concerns.

When an individual is exposed to an occasion that's perceived as stressful, the brain triggers a cascade of events ultimately resulting in the discharge of stress hormones, like cortisol. These stress hormones help prepare the individual to deal with the stressor.

However, it's been demonstrated that in pregnant women, these hormones have the power to pass from the mother to fetus via the placenta. This is often supported by studies that have found high maternal cortisol levels to correspond with high fetal cortisol levels. Exposure to high cortisol levels can then pose negative consequences to the developing fetus. Moreover, it's been demonstrated that in utero exposure to high levels of cortisol also affect postnatal development.

The psychologists advise pregnant women who are exposed to longer-term stress situations to "seek support from a therapist to handle the strain better." Past research has shown relationships between stress during pregnancy, and related psychosocial health measures like anxiety and depressive symptoms, with infant, child, and adult outcomes. However, most research is from high-income countries. We conducted a scoping review to spot research studies on prenatal stress and outcomes of the pregnancy or offspring in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and to synthesize the strain measures and outcomes assessed, the findings observed, and directions for future research.