Abstract
The preconception, pregnancy and immediate postpartum and newborn periods are times for mothers and their offspring when they are especially vulnerable to major stressors - those that are sudden and unexpected and those that are chronic. Their adverse effects can transcend generations. Stressors can include natural disasters or political stressors such as conflict and/or migration. Considerable evidence has accumulated demonstrating the adverse effects of natural disasters on pregnancy outcomes and developmental trajectories. However, beyond tracking outcomes, the time has arrived for gathering more information related to identifying mechanisms, predicting risk and developing stress-reducing and resilience-building interventions to improve outcomes. Further, we need to learn how to encapsulate both the quantitative and qualitative information available and share it with communities and authorities to mitigate the adverse developmental effects of future disasters, conflicts and migrations. This article briefly reviews prenatal maternal stress and identifies three contemporary situations (wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada; hurricane Harvey in Houston, USA and transgenerational and migrant stress in Pforzheim, Germany) where current studies are being established by Canadian investigators to test an intervention. The experiences from these efforts are related along with attempts to involve communities in the studies and share the new knowledge to plan for future disasters or tragedies.
Highlights
This paper addresses how teams of investigators in three different jurisdictions and types of vulnerabilities organized themselves and their studies of interventions to mitigate the effects of extreme stresses on pregnancy outcomes
Fort McMurray – Wood Buffalo, Alberta, Canada wildfire On 1 May 2016, a wildfire started south of the northern Albertan city of Fort McMurray – Wood Buffalo (FMWB)
King and her team from McGill University have been studying the effects of prenatal exposure to the Quebec Ice Storm of January 1998 (Project Ice Storm)
Summary
This paper addresses how teams of investigators in three different jurisdictions and types of vulnerabilities organized themselves and their studies of interventions to mitigate the effects of extreme stresses on pregnancy outcomes. The preconception, pregnancy and immediate postpartum and newborn periods are times for mothers and their offspring when they are especially vulnerable to major stressors – those that are sudden and unexpected and those that are chronic. Their adverse effects can last for years and transcend generations.[1,2] Stressors can include natural disasters or political stressors such as conflict and/or migration, which, sadly, continue at extremely high rates. Climate change and increased incidences of pandemics are expected to threaten human populations even more
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