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economists Hani Mansour and Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado Denver ( United States), found in new research that this association between prenatal exposure to violence and low weight may be due to stress. “Psychological stress is an explanation for this relationship, although we cannot exclude malnutrition”, they claim.
Según Mansour and Rees, was already known by previous research that earthquakes and terrorist attacks are associated with a lower weight at birth, so they are doomed to investigate whether the same applies to armed violence.
Mansour and Rees discussed 1,224 births of women living in the West Bank during the second Intifada. This armed uprising began in September 2000 and caused the death of more than 4,000 Palestinians. To analyze how much violence were exposed pregnant specialists calculated how many Palestinians were killed in the area where they lived.
And proved how much violence there to his eldest was around the risk of babies born with low birth weight. “We found that every additional death related to the armed conflict that occurred six to nine months before birth is associated with an increase in the possibility of having a baby of low birth weight,” says Mansour.
Mansour and Rees controlled the presence of anemia and other factors related to nutrition, but found that most likely is that the stress of the mother is the cause behind the low weight of the newborn. Experts say that its conclusions should exert influence in as it assists countries in developing or in situations of violence.
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