ArticleMaternal and child health journal2016
Prenatal Stress and the Cortisol Awakening Response in African-American and Caucasian Women in the Third Trimester of Pregnancy.
Article in Maternal and child health journal, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Systematic Review of Chronic Discrimination and Changes in Biology During Pregnancy Among African American Women.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2019Pooled it
- Superwoman Schema Endorsement and its Association to Perceived Stress During Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes among Non-Hispanic Black American Women.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Cortisol awakening response in pregnant women with depressive disorders: a potential marker of recovery status from pregnancy to postpartum.Comprehensive psychoneuroendocrinology · 2025Article
- Associations between individual and structural level discrimination and psychological and physiological stress indicators during pregnancy.npj women's health · 2025Article
- Article
- Relationships Among Number of Stressors, Perceived Stress, and Salivary Cortisol Levels During the Third Trimester of Pregnancy.Journal of obstetric, gynecologic, and neonatal nursing : JOGNN · 2024Article
- Cortisol Regulation among Women Who Experience Suicidal Ideation during Pregnancy.Journal of affective disorders reports · 2023Article
- Stress before conception and during pregnancy and maternal cortisol during pregnancy: A scoping review.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
- Pregnancy-Specific Stress and Racial Discrimination Among U.S. Women.Maternal and child health journal · 2023Article
- Maternal prenatal cortisol and the interaction of income and pre-pregnancy body mass index are independently associated with newborn cortisol.Developmental psychobiology · 2023Article
- Common model of stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in pregnant women from seven high-income Western countries at the COVID-19 pandemic onset.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Fetal Hippocampal Connectivity Shows Dissociable Associations with Maternal Cortisol and Self-Reported Distress during Pregnancy.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Racial Differences in the Risk of Prenatal Depression Among Women Experiencing Childhood and Adult Stressors.Maternal and child health journal · 2022Article
- Prenatal distress links maternal early life adversity to infant stress functioning in the next generation.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2022Article
- Cortisol and DHEA-S levels in pregnant women with severe anxiety.BMC psychiatry · 2020Article
- Conceptualization, measurement, and effects of pregnancy-specific stress: review of research using the original and revised Prenatal Distress Questionnaire.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2020Review
- Comparison of women's stress in unexplained early pregnancy loss and normal vaginal delivery.Journal of education and health promotion · 2020Article
- Maternal Cortisol Concentrations During Pregnancy and Sex-Specific Associations With Neonatal Amygdala Connectivity and Emerging Internalizing Behaviors.Biological psychiatry · 2019Article
- Racial discrimination and leukocyte glucocorticoid sensitivity: Implications for birth timing.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2018Article
- Second trimester serum cortisol and preterm birth: an analysis by timing and subtype.Journal of perinatology : official journal of the California Perinatal Association · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Objectives Prior studies have shown significant racial disparities in psychosocial stressors for pregnant women. One physiological mechanism by which prenatal stress is expressed is via the stress-sensitive hormone cortisol, which itself differs by race. In this study, we examine differences in cortisol awakening response (CAR) for African-American and Caucasian pregnant women during late pregnancy, particularly whether racial disparities are evident after accounting for measures of psychosocial stress. Methods During their third trimester of pregnancy (32-40 weeks of gestation), we asked women to self-collect salivary samples at home over 2 days. We then measured salivary cortisol across the day for 30 pregnant women (18 Caucasian; 12 African-American) to examine the CAR by race and by multiple measures of self-reported psychosocial stress, including perceived discrimination. Results Although the women in our sample showed normative cortisol diurnal rhythms (high on waking, peak 30 min post-waking, lowest at bedtime), we found that African-American women had blunted (smaller) awakening responses compared to Caucasian women (p < 0.05). The CAR was significantly larger in Caucasian women compared to African-American women even after accounting for covariates in a multivariate equation. However, when we added measures of psychosocial stress to the multivariate equation, higher levels of stress were significantly associated with a smaller CAR (p < 0.05), and the association between maternal race and CAR was no longer significant. Conclusions Our results add to a growing body of evidence that racial differences in the activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis are associated with psychosocial stress during pregnancy.
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Registered trials
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