Distress After Sept 11 Possibly Caused Rise in Miscarriages
May 27th, 2010 - 12:54 am ICT by Angela Kaye MasonMay 26 (THAINDIAN NEWS) According to a new study which has recently been released, the emotional stress, and overall shock which was felt by pregnant women after the horrific attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 may have caused an increase in fetal deaths of male babies which were to be born in the United States.
In the study, which was released on Monday, it was discovered that the fetal death rate for male babies rose in September of 2001, and therefore affected the number of boys which were born in subsequent months. The study was published in the BMC Public Health Journal. The authors feel that this may have been caused from something known as “communal bereavement” in which many members of a society all grieve from the same occurrence. It would not matter if the pregnant women had direct contact with the deceased in such a tragedy or not, the distress of such a horrible tragedy could result in the rise in miscarriages.
Tim Bruckner, who is an assistant professor of public health at University of California Irvine spoke out about the effects an event such as 9/11 could have in a country. “A huge population saw the consequences and carnage onscreen, because pregnancy is sensitive to stressors. I wondered whether pregnant women might have a physiological reaction to witnessing harm.”
These researchers suspect that unborn male babies react differently to stress hormones than females, thus why the rise in male deaths. This is not the only case of such communal bereavement and subsequent deaths of unborn male babies. In 2005, a severe drop in Swedish economy affected the ration of female to male births, and in 1998, a study showed that there was a marked decline in male births after the horrible earthquake in 1995.
Professor and chairman of the department of gynecology and obstetrics at the Emory University School of Medicine, Dr Sarah Berga stated “There’s nothing more contagious than emotion. If something bad happens, you have a negative contagion. Having something really bad happen, it strikes me it would resonate through a population.”
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Tags: attack on the world trade center, bmc public health, dr sarah, emory university school, emory university school of medicine, emotional stress, fetal death, fetal deaths, horrible earthquake, horrible tragedy, male babies, male births, male deaths, miscarriages, physiological reaction, public health journal, september 11 2001, swedish economy, tim bruckner, university of california irvine
