Women more likely to give birth to girl when stressed: study

By Lee Seung-joon




Mothers suffering from stress are more likely to have girl babies.

The result has come out in a research by a group of professors from Oxford University on whether mothers give birth to female or male babies when they are stressed at work in the months before getting pregnant.

In the latest study, 338 participants from England kept diaries about the degree of stress they received during a given period. The researchers also checked the level of cortisol, a kind of hormone linked to stress, they release.

At the annual conference of American Society for Reproduction Medicine last week, the researchers reported that 207 of the participants became successfully pregnant. They claimed that the sex ratio was clearly skewed towards female babies from the women who showed the larger amount of cortisol. “Of the babies born, 58 were boys and 72 were girls, indicative of a "strong female excess," a researcher said.
Dr Cecilia Pyper, a researcher at Oxford University, said that pregnant women with financial problems had the highest level of cortisol.

They said that historical data also supports their research outcome. For example, during the several months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the number of boys born in New York sharply decreased. Moreover, during the economic hardship following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, fewer boys were born than before in then East Germany in 1991.

Dr Pyper and the scientists from U.S. admit that an additional research will be needed to clarify the findings as they made the study with a small number of women.

However, she is optimistic about the potential of the study. “If the findings of this study are confirmed by larger studies, women may also be advised about reducing stress.”


http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2011/10/325_97066.html