11 Dec 2012

Fear of childbirth creates longer labour

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Nervous about giving birth? A new study reports that your emotional state could affect the length of your labour.

Pregnancy and preconception

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Nervous about giving birth? A new study reports that your emotional state could affect the length of your labour.

Fear may extend the amount of time a woman spends delivering her first child, a Scandinavian study of over 2000 women has found.

Published in the journal Epidemiology, the study – conducted at Akershus University Hospital in Norway – examined the link between fear of giving birth and the duration of labour. It did so by assessing the emotional state of 2206 women who were 32 weeks pregnant and expecting their first child.

7.5 per cent of women sampled showed fear of childbirth, and, on average these women had 47-minute longer labours when compared with women who did not fear labour.

“The duration of labour remained significantly longer in women with fear of childbirth,” the authors wrote.

Why this occurs is not entirely clear, lead author Samantha Salvesen Adams, a researcher at Akershus University Hospital in Lorenskog, Norway, told the New York Times.

“There are two theories,” she said. “First, stressed women have higher stress hormones during pregnancy, and high stress hormones may weaken the power of the uterus to contract. And second, we think that women who fear childbirth may communicate in different ways with health care professionals during pregnancy.”

References available on request

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