Association of Birthweight With Maternal Trajectories of Effort-Reward Imbalance and Demand-Control Across Pregnancy

Validation of the Employment Precariousness Scale and its associations with mental health outcomes: results from a prospective community-based study of pregnant women and their partners in Dresden, Germany

OBJECTIVE

To translate the Employment Precariousness Scale (EPRES) from Spanish into German (EPRES-Ge), adapt it to the German context, assess the psychometric properties and show prospective associations with mental health outcomes within the peripartum period.

DESIGN

Analyses encompassed descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to validate the structure of the EPRES, and multivariate regression analyses with mental health outcomes 8 weeks after birth.

PARTICIPANTS

Self-report data from 3,455 pregnant women and their partners within the Dresden Study on Parenting, Work, and Mental Health prospective longitudinal cohort study were used.

RESULTS

The EPRES-Ge with five dimensions and 20 items showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's α=0.77). All scales showed good reliability coefficients of α=0.73-0.85 and good item-subscale correlations of r=0.63-0.98, with the exception of subscale rights, which showed poor reliability of α=0.30 and item-subscale correlations of r=0.45-0.68. Exploratory analysis and CFA confirmed the proposed five-dimensional structure, explaining 45.08% of the cumulative variance. Regression analyses with mental health outcomes after birth revealed statistically significant associations (β=0.12-0.20).

CONCLUSIONS

The EPRES-Ge is a valuable tool for assessing employment precariousness as a multidimensional construct. The scales could be adapted to the German working context. Precarious employment, as measured by the EPRES-Ge, is a determinant of mental health problems in young families.

Perceptions of Job Hazards and Requests for Accommodation Among Pregnant Women in a Large Urban Hospital System

BACKGROUND

Many pregnant women remain uninformed about job accommodation options or have not been empowered to ask their employers.

METHODS

A cross-sectional survey of a sample base of pregnant women from late first through third trimester was conducted. Associations between job perception variables, work characteristics, race/ethnicity, and income were assessed using binary logistic regression.

RESULTS

Workers in service/support occupations were twice as likely as those in management to perceive need for job duty change and to request job accommodation. Perception of needed job change was higher when jobs had high physical demands and low substantive complexity.

CONCLUSIONS

We found positive relationships between highly physical work, perception of harm, and need for job change in pregnancy. Further research could explore worker/employer characteristics explaining why these perceptions did not translate into requesting and receiving job accommodation during pregnancy.

Prenatal chronic stress impairs the learning and memory ability via inhibition of the NO/cGMP/PKG pathway in the Hippocampus of offspring

Numerous clinical and animal studies have found that antenatal chronic stress can lead to pathological changes the hippocampal development from embryos to adult, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Proteomic analyses provide a new insight to explore the potential mechanisms of this impairment. In this study, gestating rats were subjected to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) during pregnant days using nine different stimulations, and the changes of the learning and memory performance and the expression of proteins in the hippocampus of offspring were measured. It was found that prenatal chronic stress led to growth retardation, impaired spatial learning and memory ability in the offspring. Furthermore, prenatal stress caused various degrees of damage to neurons, Nissl body, mitochondria and synaptic structures in hippocampal CA3 region of offspring. In addition, 26 significantly different expressed proteins (DEPs) were found between the two groups by using isoquantitative tag-based relative and absolute quantification (iTRAQ) proteomics analysis. Further analyses of these DEPs showed that involved with different molecular functions and several biological processes, such as biological regulation and metabolic processes. Among these, the KEGG pathway enrichment showed that learning and memory impairment was mainly associated with the cyclic guanosine monophosphate protein kinase G (cGMP-PKG) pathway. At the same time, compared with OPC group, the NO, nNOS and cGMP level were significantly decreased, and the expression of PKG protein was also dropped. All of these results suggested that pregnant rats exposed to chronic psychological stress might impair spatial learning and memory ability of offspring, by disturbing the NO/cGMP/PKG signaling pathway.

The mechanism of enriched environment repairing the learning and memory impairment in offspring of prenatal stress by regulating the expression of activity-regulated cytoskeletal-associated and insulin-like growth factor-2 in hippocampus

Background

Prenatal stress can cause neurobiological and behavioral defects in offspring; environmental factors play a crucial role in regulating the development of brain and behavioral; this study was designed to test and verify whether an enriched environment can repair learning and memory impairment in offspring rats induced by prenatal stress and to explore its mechanism involving the expression of insulin-like growth factor-2 (IGF-2) and activity-regulated cytoskeletal-associated protein (Arc) in the hippocampus of the offspring.

Methods

Rats were selected to establish a chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) model during pregnancy. Offspring were weaned on 21st day and housed under either standard or an enriched environment. The learning and memory ability were tested using Morris water maze and Y-maze. The expression of IGF-2 and Arc mRNA and protein were respectively measured by using RT-PCR and Western blotting.

Results

There was an elevation in the plasma corticosterone level of rat model of maternal chronic stress during pregnancy. Maternal stress’s offspring exposed to an enriched environment could decrease their plasma corticosterone level and improve their weight. The offspring of maternal stress during pregnancy exhibited abnormalities in Morris water maze and Y-maze, which were improved in an enriched environment. The expression of IGF-2, Arc mRNA, and protein in offspring of maternal stress during pregnancy was boosted and some relationships existed between these parameters after being exposed enriched environment.

Conclusions

The learning and memory impairment in offspring of prenatal stress can be rectified by the enriched environment, the mechanism of which is related to the decreasing plasma corticosterone and increasing hippocampal IGF-2 and Arc of offspring rats following maternal chronic stress during pregnancy.

Precarious working conditions and psychosocial work stress act as a risk factor for symptoms of postpartum depression during maternity leave: results from a longitudinal cohort study

BACKGROUND

The majority of Western women work during their reproductive years, but past research has often neglected the influence of work-related factors on postpartum mental health. Especially postpartum depression (PPD) is an enormous psychological burden for mothers. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the prospective impact of precarious working conditions and psychosocial work stress during pregnancy (such as work-privacy conflict and effort-reward imbalance at the job) on symptoms of maternal PPD.

METHODS

In the prospective-longitudinal cohort study DREAM (DResdner Studie zu Elternschaft, Arbeit und Mentaler Gesundheit), N = 587 employed women were questioned about their work during pregnancy and their mental health 8 weeks after delivery.

RESULTS

Multiple regression analyses revealed that work-privacy conflict, low reward at work, and precarious working conditions significantly predicted symptoms of PPD, even when controlling for lifetime depression, anxiety, education, parity, and age.

CONCLUSION

Our results indicate that psychosocial work stress and precarious working conditions have important implications for maternal peripartum mental health. They might act as prospective risk factors for PPD during the period of maternal leave. Hence, future research should focus on preventative measures targeting work life.

Occupational Hazard Exposures and Depressive Symptoms of Pregnant Workers

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was to explore the prevalence of exposure to occupational hazards and depressive mood with associated underlying risk factors among pregnant workers.

METHODS

Women at 12 weeks of gestation (n = 172) were recruited during regular prenatal screening. Data were obtained via questionnaires that explored job details and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale.

RESULTS

The most commonly encountered hazard was prolonged standing. The majority of women reported that the workplace provided no information on the safety or rights of pregnant women, but those exposed to at least four hazards had more access to such services (P < 0.05). Thirteen percent may have suffered from depressive symptomatology. Higher-level work-related burnout, lower job control, and reduced workplace support were significantly associated with possible antenatal depressive symptoms.

CONCLUSION

Pregnant workers are exposed to substantial levels of occupational hazards and may experience depressive symptoms; thus, their work conditions require monitoring and improvement.