Prof Says Anxiety Has No Impact On Baby's Health

New assistant professor of psychology Heather Littleton

A Sam Houston State University psychology professor has found that women who worry during their pregnancies are not endangering their newborn’s health.

That question has yielded conflicting results for more than 40 years and was recently sorted out by Heather Littleton, assistant professor of psychology, while doing her post-doctorate fellowship.

“There were a number of reasons hypothesized why a woman’s anxiety symptoms during pregnancy—so things like feeling tense, worried, keyed up—(why) having those physiological symptoms would be associated with negative perinatal outcomes of pregnancy,” she said. “However, researchers in the field disagreed on whether there was any relationship between anxiety and negative perinatal outcome.”

What Littleton and her co-researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston found was that anxiety during pregnancy doesn’t appear to raise the risk of low birth weight, long labor or other negative outcomes.

This conclusion, based on a meta analysis of more than 50 studies spanning the years of 1963 to 2005 and including a combined total of more than 15,000 mothers, has received national attention, appearing in such outlets as in the health section of the New York Times, WebMD, Yahoo News, and UPI, as well as at least one medical journal.

“We were able to find studies that assess several perinatal outcomes: intensive labor, use of analgesia during labor, gestational age at birth, Apgar score (which rates the general health of a newborn), and neonatal weight,” Littleton said. “Those were the five outcomes that were assessed in enough studies for us to include; at least three studies have been published looking at what their anxiety symptoms associated with that particular outcome.

“What we found was that there really were no significant relationships between anxiety and any of those five outcomes,” she said.

The group analyzed studies from all over the U.S. and Europe, “anything that was written in English,” Littleton said, which included unpublished studies such as students’ dissertations.

“Something else we also found that strengthens our results is that studies that have larger samples of women and studies that use measure of anxiety symptoms that have more empirical support were the ones that were most likely to find no relationship,” she said.

While general anxiety was found to have no effect on the outcome of pregnancies, anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder, as well as certain outcomes such as pre-eclampsia, were not included in the Littleton’s research due to the lack of information on those topics.

“Those are a couple of key ones (outcomes) that have been hypothesized to be associated with anxiety but haven’t been studied enough for us to include them,” she said.

Littleton said she thinks the research has attracted so much media attention because of the lack of knowledge and agreement on the topic.

“In general, there has been a lack of research on women’s health issues and that instead, I think practitioners have been guided by a lot of anecdotal information or clinical lore, as opposed to doing actual clinical investigation,” she said.

Littleton, who joined SHSU’s faculty this fall, said she had previously focused her studies primarily on sexual assault among women and body image issues but hopes to continue looking into perinatal issues associated with stress.

She received her doctorate in clinical psychology in 2004 from Virginia Tech before spending the past two years completing her post-doctorate fellowship.

Among Littleton’s current projects, she is working with several SHSU graduate students to do a meta analysis on how people cope with traumatic events and whether that is related to the distress they experience after trauma.

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SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
Aug. 22, 2006
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