According to a recent study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, depression caused by discrimination could eventually result in low weight babies at the time of birth.
Valerie Earnshaw and her team from Yale University have determined that although it has been long known that it is important to decrease the risk of health problems in a woman’s life in order to avoid low birth weight, new evidence suggests that discrimination on a regular basis against pregnant urban women can play a large part in increased risk of low birth weight among newborns.
In the U.S., white and Latina women give birth to low weight babies half as much as black women, although the reasons are not yet completely known. However, the evidence that does exist supports the notion that if women who are pregnant are discriminated against, low birth weight occurs.
Low birth weight can result in fetal and prenatal morbidity, suppressed growth and slower cognitive development and chronic diseases later in the baby’s life.
Discrimination has also been associated with depression, which results in physiological changes, which hurt pregnancy outcomes in the long run.
For their study, the researchers interviewed 420 black and Latina women between the ages of 14 and 21 during their second and third trimesters. They interviewed the women again when their babies were 6 and 12 months old. The interviews were held at 14 community health centers and hospitals in New York, and the researchers asked about their experiences with discrimination, depression, and pregnancy discomfort.
The women reported discrimination on a daily basis to be low, but the result of discrimination in general seems to be the same across the board, with the same outcomes for all of the women, despite differences in age, race or type of discrimination.
Those who said they had been discriminated against the most had higher levels of depression and eventually had babies who weighed less at birth then the women who reported less.
The researchers say that it is important for physicians to attempt to lower the effect that discrimination has on the pregnant women to avoid negative birth weight outcomes.
The authors concluded:
“Given the associations between birth weight and health across the life span, it is critical to reduce discrimination directed at urban youth of color so that all children are able to begin life with greater promise for health. In doing so, we have the possibility to eliminate disparities not only in birth weight, but in health outcomes across the lifespan.”
Written by Christine Kearney