Psychosocial stress in pregnancy and preterm birth: associations and mechanisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: Psychosocial stress during pregnancy (PSP) is a risk factor of growing interest in the etiology of preterm birth (PTB). This literature review assesses the published evidence concerning the association between PSP and PTB, highlighting established and hypothesized physiological pathways mediating this association. METHOD: The PubMed and Web of Science databases were searched using the keywords "psychosocial stress", "pregnancy", "pregnancy stress", "preterm", "preterm birth", "gestational age", "anxiety", and "social support". After applying the exclusion criteria, the search produced 107 articles. RESULTS: The association of PSP with PTB varied according to the dimensions and timing of PSP. Stronger associations were generally found in early pregnancy, and most studies demonstrating positive results found moderate effect sizes, with risk ratios between 1.2 and 2.1. Subjective perception of stress and pregnancy-related anxiety appeared to be the stress measures most closely associated with PTB. Potential physiological pathways identified included behavioral, infectious, neuroinflammatory, and neuroendocrine mechanisms. CONCLUSIONS: Future research should examine the biological pathways of these different psychosocial stress dimensions and at multiple time points across pregnancy. Culture-independent characterization of the vaginal microbiome and noninvasive monitoring of cholinergic activity represent two exciting frontiers in this research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".