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CHILDBIRTH - Stress Tied to Prematurity
September 25, 2001;Washington Post Page F3

Victims of the terrorists who struck New York and Washington may include an unexpected group: fetuses being carried by American women who watched the attacks unfold.

A research paper on communal bereavement -- "the widespread experience of distress among persons who never met the deceased" -- suggests that people can be particularly affected "when the death implies the failure of institutions essential to the normal functioning of the community." The study will be published later this year in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

The paper's authors investigated whether two events that galvanized and deeply troubled people in Sweden -- the 1986 murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme and the deaths of more than 900 people in the sinking of a Baltic Sea ferry in 1994 -- were associated in the following weeks with an increase in the rate of premature babies of dangerously low weight (about 3.3 pounds or less).

The answer was yes: These high-risk births were 21 percent more common after the assassination than would ordinarily be expected and 15 percent more common after the ferry Estonia went down in a storm.

"A huge fraction of these babies die," said Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of the study. He linked the premature deliveries to the mothers' excess levels of cortisol, a hormone that can be produced in reaction to stress. While this study looked only at birthweight as a barometer of emotional impact, Catalano noted that among women in earlier stages of pregnancy, a spike in cortisol can produce an above-normal number of miscarriages.

Catalano said his study considered all births occurring in Sweden, which has a population of about 8.5 million. As for how widespread the effects of this month's terrorist attacks might be in the United States, he said that "our communities are less defined by geography" than they once were, but "it's clear that New York and Washington were the epicenters of the response."

According to the study, the 501 Swedes who were among the sinking's fatalities "would be comparable to 16,000 Americans today." -- Tom Graham