The Relationship between Psychological Profile of Pregnant Women with Weight, Height and Head Circumference of Infants at Birth

Document Type : 78

Authors

• afsar haji
• himan Mahmoud Fakhe
• kiomars karimi
• azadeh abasi

Abstract

Background & objective: pregnancy involves not only physical changes but also psychological changes in pregnant women. Several factors affect the health of the mother's pregnancy, including maternal psychological factors, anxiety, stress and depression. Pregnancy can be so stressful that can lead to mental illnesses and anxiety during pregnancy. This circumstance can cause serious consequences such as insufficiency in height and weight of infants at birth.
Methods: This descriptive study is to investigate the relationship between psychological states amid pregnant women and height, weight and head circumference of infants at birth. Purposive sampling method was employed to estimate the sample size (sample number 60). The data collection instruments are depression, anxiety and stress questionnaire (DASS) and the multidimensional scale of perceived social support (MSPSS) that were completed in the last three months of pregnancy by pregnant women and physical conditions of infants were extracted from the medical profiles.
Results: The results of this study indicates that perceived social support for pregnant mothers has effect on physical status of infants. According to the study, it was found that social support is particularly important that it has effects on weight (p= 0.018) and head circumference (p= 0.007). Furthermore, between depression, anxiety and stress of mothers with infant's insignificant partial correlation was shown.
Conclusion: Due to difficulty of pregnancy and increased sensitivity of pregnant women at this time, owning to hormonal changes and certain physical reasons, the need for support from family and other supportive resources, particularly husbands, seems to be significant.

Keywords

• infants
• birth
• mothers
• Pregnancy
• Weight

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