"Try to provide yourself with what you consider a good environment. The less stress, the better," counsels Pablo Nepomnaschy, a lead expert and a postdoctoral fellow in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Nepomnaschy and his colleagues published their discoveries this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The NIH team examined 61 women over 12 months. They were collecting woman's urine three times a week in order to check for pregnancy status as well as levels of cortisol, a hormone that is linked to stress.
"This study is special in the sense that we include cortisol data," stated Nepomnaschy.
He emphasized that they conducted the testing at the early stages of pregnancy because "most pregnancy losses take place in the first three to four weeks after conception."
Of the 61 women that were examined, 22 became pregnant, 9 carried to term and 13 women miscarried. The scientists found that women with boosted levels of cortisol during the first three weeks of pregnancy were 2.7 times more prone to miscarry.
To sum up, miscarriages happened in 90 percent of pregnancies in which the women had boosted cortisol levels and in 33 percent of those with acceptable cortisol levels.
Nepomnaschy said it is obscure why an increase of cortisol level might raise the risk of miscarriage, but his hypotesis is that "the body might interpret that [increased cortisol level] as conditions deteriorating, and maybe that might trigger an abortion mechanism."
All the examined women were inhabitants of a rural area of Guatemala. "This population is more alike than any population in the United States," Nepomnaschy stated, explaining that he wanted to examine a group of females who were similar in ethnicity, culture and lifestyle to eliminate other factors linked to miscarriage. The females ate similar diets, had similar activity levels, and they were all of the same ethnicity.
Dr. Mary Stephenson, another scientist who is an obstetrician-gynecologist and leads the Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Program at the University of Chicago, claims that "It's an intriguing article. Certainly more research is needed. But it is a potential mechanism by which miscarriage may occur."
Stephenson said that other research have investigated the link between cortisol levels and miscarriage. "The results have been conflicting. There are some studies in animals that suggest that stress increased the risk of miscarriage. And doctors have long suspected that stress does the same in people."
Miscarriages occur in about 15 percent of recognized pregnancies, according to the March of Dimes. However, Stephenson emphasized that statistic usually takes into account pregnancies that last at least six weeks. "When you count the ones that occur before six weeks, up to half of pregnancies end in miscarriage," she added.
The best piece of advice for women trying to become pregnant is to de-stress their lives before conception.
"I talk about this a lot with my patients," Stephenson noted. "I recommend that before they get pregnant, they take a serious look at their lifestyle."
And that means getting enough sleep, so fatigue is not an issue. "Fatigue is a type of stress," Stephenson stated.
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Paul Douglas
This article was reprinted from PharmacyCenter.org health blog.