Mental Health

Labor Pain Lasts Longer For Women Who are Nervous

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Jun 28, 2012 07:29 AM EDT

A human body can bear only up to 45 Del (unit) of pain but at the time of giving birth, a woman feels up to 57 Del of pain. This is similar to 20 bones getting fractured at a time! For that very reason, the thought of delivering a baby, understandably makes a woman nervous.  

Every woman wishes for the shortest possible labor time. But researchers say, that women who are nervous about delivery take longer to deliver. While a nervous woman would take around eight hours to give birth a woman is not scared might do the same in six and a half hours.

Researchers believe that one-fifth of women are nervous about giving birth, known as tocophobia.

The cause behind the same is that when a woman is scared, her body releases adrenaline, which stops proper contraction of the muscles in the womb and prevents her from pushing out the baby.

Also, the research found that those women who are scared are the ones who generally need an epidural or a caesarean.

For the study, researchers from the University of Oslo asked 2,206 women who were 32 weeks pregnant to take a psychological which figured out their nervousness of childbirth. The results found that about 7.5 percent (all first time conceivers) were scared of childbirth.

"Generally, longer labour duration increases the risk of emergency caesarean section. However, it is important to note that a large proportion of women with a fear of childbirth successfully had a vaginal delivery and so elective caesarean delivery should not be routinely recommended," Lead researcher Samantha Salvesen Adams, of the Health Services Research Centre, Akershus University Hospital, Norway was quoted as saying by Mail Online.

The study was published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

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