Psychosocial stress during pregnancy could lead to greater blood pressure during the first year after childbirth according to the Keck School of Medicine of the USC.
The study, published in Hypertension And backed by the National Health Institutes, he investigated whether mothers who reported greater perceived stress and depressive symptoms during pregnancy, developed greater blood pressure in the period of four years after birth. The findings showed greater stress and depressive symptoms during pregnancy were associated with greater blood pressure during the first year after childbirth, but the associations decreased from then on.
“Pregnancy is a complex moment in which women experience different physiological changes,” says Noelle Pardo, main author of the study and third -year doctoral student in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences of the Keck Medicine School. “This study is based on maternal health research to understand how stressful factors affect the lives of women and their health after pregnancy.”
The study included data from 225 mothers of the mothers pregnancy cohort that consists mainly in Hispanic women and low -income participants living in Los Angeles. Hispanic women have a high load of cardiovascular risk, and there is a growing evidence that links psychosocial stressors with poor cardiovascular health, which is a main cause of death among women in the United States.
In addition to prenatal psychosocial stress, Pardo explored whether the prenatal social cohesion of the neighborhood was a protective factor for the risk of postpartum hypertension, a first investigation of this type. This refers to the feeling of connection and trusts that a pregnant woman experiences in her community. According to their findings, the social structures that promoted cohesion may have had a positive influence during pregnancy in the postpartum period and associated with a lower blood pressure.
“We chose social cohesion as a variable to understand how connected the participants felt with their community. At this time, there are not many programs or policies that help foster cohesion, however, such interventions can serve as a new protection factor,” she says.
According to Pardo, maternal health research has focused mainly on the results of pregnancy, with limited studies that investigate the mother’s health after birth. However, its results have demonstrated how crucial this research is in the identification of conditions rooted in pregnancy.
The application of the real world of this study requires the identification of vulnerable individuals in the pregnant population, offering interventions to reduce stress and depressive symptoms. Similarly, it emphasizes the importance of monitoring women’s health after birth, through the provision of additional hypertension exams among mothers who experience greater prenatal stress.
“Pregnancy can be important to determine the long -term cardiovascular health of a woman. In the same way, more research is needed to determine how different exhibitions during pregnancy can transmit future cardiovascular risk to women,” he concludes.