TUESDAY, June 8 (HealthDay News) — There may be a link between
childhood hardships and pregnancy problems in adulthood.

A new study by U.S. researchers involved 4,865 women who’d experienced
at least one hardship during childhood and had given birth at least once
by age 41. Hardships included family problems with alcohol, fathers who
didn’t take an interest in the child’s schooling, family financial
difficulties and neglect.

Most of the women in the study had their first child in their 20s, and
most had one, two or three children. In their first pregnancy, 7.9 percent
of the women gave birth to a baby whose weight was below normal, 7.5
percent gave birth more than three weeks early. About 39 percent of the
women smoked at some point during their first pregnancy. Overall, 5.8
percent of all pregnancies resulted in babies with low birth weights and
6.5 percent of the women had pre-term births.

“When results were examined by timing of exposure, family structure
hardships and violence/mental health hardships most strongly influenced
the birth outcomes if they happened in adolescence,” wrote Emily W.
Harville, of Tulane University in New Orleans, and her colleagues.
“Overall, the highest risk for both low birth weight and pre-term birth
was in those who had multiple hardships in adolescence only, but this was
also a very small group.”

“Our findings suggest that mothers who have experienced childhood
hardship are more likely to smoke during pregnancy,” Harville said. “They
also more often give birth to low birth weight babies who are born
prematurely, but this association may be primarily due to health behaviors
and associated social class.”

The researchers said their findings also suggest that “there are
critical periods for elevated risk, as well as a cumulative effect of
hardships over time, adding that additional study would be needed “to
specify pathways between childhood adversities and reproductive health
outcomes and to evaluate protective factors that could help to alleviate
long-term influences of early adversity.”

The study is published in the June issue of the Archives of
Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

More information

The March of Dimes has more about low birth weight.

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