VOA慢速:Stress in pregnancy adds risk of miscarrage
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This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm Faith Lapidus.
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And I'm Bob Doughty. This week: a report that Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing rate.
We also will tell about a bird with an excellent memory.
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But first, we tell about a study of special interest to women.
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Women who experience emotional tension in the first weeks of pregnancy may be at greater risk of suffering a failed pregnancy. A new study suggests a link between the tension, worry, and pressure a woman feels and her ability to carry an unborn child, or fetus. The failure of a pregnancy and resulting death of the fetus is called a miscarriage.
The results of the study were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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Pablo Nepomnaschy works for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. His research team studied sixty-one women for one year. All the women lived in Guatemala and were already caring for at least one baby.
The researchers tested the women for pregnancy and measured cortisol in their liquid wastes. Cortisol is a substance, or hormone, produced by the body. Other studies have linked it to emotional tension, also known as stress.
Twenty-two of the sixty-one women became pregnant during the study. The researchers compared the pregnant women who had higher than normal cortisol levels to those who did not. They found that women with the higher levels during the first three weeks of pregnancy were nearly three times more likely to miscarry.
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The researchers say a woman's body may recognize increased cortisol levels as a sign that conditions are not right for pregnancy.
They also say other studies might have failed to find the link between stress and miscarriages because they involved women who had been pregnant for at least six weeks. Most miscarriages happen during the first three weeks of pregnancy.
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An American study suggests that anger appears to increase your risk of suffering an injury. It found that angry adults are more likely than other men and women to suffer an injury requiring emergency medical care. Study organizers say the risk of serious injury also is higher for men than for women.
Dan Vinson of the University of Missouri at Columbia led the research team. They questioned more than two thousand people who had been treated in hospital emergency rooms. The patients were asked to describe their emotions twenty-four hours before the injury and then in the minutes just before their injury. The answers were compared with those provided by a group of uninjured adults.
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Some of the patients described themselves with words such as excited, angry and hostile. Patients who described themselves as feeling easily angered had a thirty percent increased risk of suffering a serious injury. Among men, the risk of injury increased one hundred percent if the man described himself as being hostile or angry at himself.
The study also suggested a link between anger and sports injuries and attacks.
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Professor Vinson and his team also examined suspected links between anger and traffic injuries. But they were unable to find such a link. Professor Vinson noted that some people get angry when they drive. Yet their actions generally do not cause traffic accidents. An earlier study in Finland reached the same finding.
Professor Vinson estimates that at least ten percent of emergency room visits could be avoided if people did not take action when they are angry. He urged doctors to begin recognizing when their patients have injured themselves because of anger. He said doctors also may need to suggest anger control programs in a
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