The Relationships between Personality Characteristics and Health Related Behaviors with Pregnancy Outcomes

Abstract

While 10% of all births in the United States are preterm, we only know the cause of 60% of cases. One pathway overlooked may be anxiety. The goal of this study was to identify how much variance factors previously identified to contribute to preterm birth had on the outcomes of infant weight and preterm birth. Data were collected retrospectively via an online survey from women who live in the United States who had given birth within the last six months. There were 348 participants. For each of the outcome measures a multiple regression was run with three groupings. The first grouping was demographic variables. For the seconding grouping health variables were added to demographic variables. The third group included demographic variable, health variables and psychological variables. In the multiple regressions state and trait anxiety were significant predictors for infant birth weight even when accounting for the variance of health and demographics where women with more trait anxiety gave birth to higher weight infants and women with more state anxiety gave birth to lower weight infants. State and trait anxiety were also marginally significant for gestational length with the same relationship of trait increasing and state decreasing gestational length. While the total variances accounted for by the regression were small, trait and state anxiety are interesting as it shows that type or level of anxiety may play a role in whether anxiety contributes to poor birth outcomes.