The Relationship between Health-related Quality of Life, Mother’s Birth Circumstances and Fear of Childbirth: A Transgenerational Approach

Abstract

Intensive fear of pregnancy and childbirth can be one source of maternal stress, which might lead to anxiety and depression in the perinatal period. By the last decades of the 20th century, this issue has attracted remarkable scientific and clinical attention worldwide, particularly in the Nordic states and Australia. The association between fear of childbirth and prolonged labor, elective and emergency cesarean section, negative birth experience, and posttraumatic stress disorder has been documented in recent studies. Also, fear of childbirth has been shown to be a cause of postponement or avoidance of pregnancy among nulliparous women. These potentially serious complications highlight the clinical importance of investigating and evaluating fear of childbirth by means of a precise and valid instrument. Of the several instruments aimed to assess fear of childbirth during pregnancy, the Wijma Delivery Expectancy/Experience Questionnaire A (W-DEQ A) has been most frequently utilized in studies. It was developed in the late 1980s to assess fear of childbirth by mapping pregnant women’s anticipations and worries regarding their birth. In Hungary, according to our knowledge, there has not been a valid and reliable instrument available for the assessment of fear of childbirth. health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is a broad concept encompassing those aspects of overall quality of life that can be clearly shown to affect health—either physical or mental. It is a multidimensional concept comprising physical, mental and emotional, and social functioning domains. As has been mentioned above, FOC is paired with some negative physical and psychological consequences (e.g. fatigue, sleep disturbance, anxiety, and depression) that may be influential in different domains of HRQOl. However, respect to their multidimensional structure, it has not been evidenced that how FOC subscales can affect different domains of HRQOl and which of its domains are mostly influenced by FOC. It is, therefore, essential to provide a hypothesized model to specify all the causal linkages between these variables after adjusting for confounding variables.