A new study has found that babies born to women, who were anxious or depressed during pregnancy, may have trouble sleeping at night as infants, according to researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Published in the journal Early Human Development , the study assessed more than 14,000 women in Britain.
It was found that babies born to mothers classified as anxious or depressed while pregnant were about 40 per cent more likely to refuse to go to bed, to wake up early or to persistently crawl out of bed.
""We've long known that a child's sleep is vital to his or her growth, but the origins of problems affecting it remained unclear. Now, we have evidence that these patterns may be set early on, perhaps even before birth. This is another piece in the unfolding mystery of just how much the prenatal environment may shape a child's health and development for years to come,"" said lead author Dr. Thomas O'Connor, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
The survey-based study, part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), assessed pregnant women living in Avon, England, who were due to give birth in a 21-month window. More than 14,000 women - an estimated 85 to 90 per cent of those eligible - responded to questionnaires that gauged how depressed or anxious they were at multiple points early on in, late in, and after their pregnancy.
Later on, the women were asked to report on their child's sleep habits at 6, 18 and 30 months, detailing how long the child slept, how often the child awoke, and if he or she exhibited any of seven common forms of sleep problems, such as having nightmares, refusing to go to bed or having trouble falling asleep.
Unexpectedly, babies born to mothers classified as anxious or depressed while pregnant slept just as long as their unstressed-pregnancy counterparts - about 12 hours.
However, this sleep was less sweet; children born to mothers who were depressed or anxious during pregnancy experienced more sleep problems. For instance, mothers classified as clinically anxious 18 weeks into pregnancy, compared to their non-anxious counterparts, were about 40 percent more likely to have an 18-month-old who refused to go to bed, woke early, and kept crawling out of bed.
According to O'Connor, the findings are ""another piece in the unfolding mystery of just how much the prenatal environment may shape a child's health and development for years to come.""
These prenatal mood disturbances worked as consistent predictors of children's sleep problems even when investigators controlled data for other factors already linked with poor sleep quality in children, including a mother's level of postnatal anxiety or depression, her smoking habit, or her social class.
""This problematic sleep is notable; it may be part of the reason why mood-disturbed pregnancies are linked to children's behavioral disorders, like depression, hyperactivity and anxiety, later on down the road,"" O'Connor said.
""It remains to be seen if the sleep problems we witnessed may play an active, causal role in priming the path for these children's emotional and cognitive problems in later life, or if both conditions merely fall out of the same stressful pregnancies,"" the researcher added.
Related studies show that stress, which is associated with increased exposure stress hormones such as cortisol, may disrupt a child's formation of a bundle of nerve cells in the brain that tunes the body's internal clock.
This could explain why sound sleep doesn't come easily to kids whose signaling systems may not be properly calibrated, O'Connor said. However, more research is needed to monitor this signaling pathway more closely, watching for biological hints as to why sleep and behavioral disturbances so often crop up together, he added.
(Source: Times of India