For many women, pregnancy brings not only joy but also stress – a factor that can shape both maternal well-being and a child’s future health. In this episode, we explore what constitutes normal stress, when it becomes harmful, and how pregnancy-specific stress can be understood and measured.
Stress during pregnancy can affect not only the mother and the fetus, but also the child’s health later in life. What level of stress is still considered normal, and when can it become harmful? What are the main sources of stress for pregnant women? And how is prenatal stress actually measured?
While early studies on stress in pregnancy were based on the assumption that stress is a general feeling, Professor Marci Lobel began focusing in the mid-1980s on stress specific to pregnancy. At the time, she was among the first to examine prenatal stress more systematically. She contributed to the development of the foundations of a questionnaire known as the Prenatal Distress Questionnaire and identified early evidence that stress during pregnancy increases the risk of preterm birth and lower birth weight.
Over the years, Professor Lobel revised the questionnaire, which has since been translated into several languages and used in hundreds of subsequent studies that have confirmed and expanded her findings. The current version, known as the Nu-PDQ, is considered the gold standard for measuring pregnancy-specific anxieties and is widely used to identify women who may require additional support during pregnancy.
What exactly causes stress in pregnant women? What level of stress is still acceptable, and when does it become harmful? How can stress affect both the mother and the child? And how do expectant mothers in the Czech Republic compare? These questions are also explored by Professor Marci Lobel at the Department of Medical Psychology and Ethics at the Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, where she is spending the spring semester as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. She also addresses them in this special English-language episode of the Stetoskop podcast.
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