The experience of bearing a child: implications on body boundaries and their link to preterm birth.

BACKGROUND: Preterm birth, which occurs when a baby is born before 37 weeks, has enormous implications for public health. It is the leading cause of infant death and mortality in children under the age of five. Unfortunately, the multifaceted causes of preterm birth are not fully understood. One construct that has received increasing attention in women's transition to motherhood is body boundaries, i.e., the metaphorical barriers that separate the self from the outer, surrounding "not self." This study aims to examine the role of well-defined and disturbed body boundaries in predicting preterm birth. METHODS: A sample of 655 Israeli pregnant women reported their sense of body boundaries (BBS, as measured by the Sense of Body Boundaries Survey) pre- and postnatally. We performed a General Linear Model (GLM) testing the effect of the BBS total score on the days women delivered before their due date and controlling for whether it was the women's first child. RESULTS: Our GLMs controlling for whether it was the women's first child showed that the BBS total mean exhibited a significant predictive effect on the number of days delivered before the due date (F(57,313) = 3.65, p < .001). CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate heterogeneity in women's sense of body boundaries during pregnancy and are the first to disentangle a link between disturbed body boundaries and preterm birth. Mediating mechanisms in this relation, e.g., psychosocial stress, as well as clinical implications are discussed in detail.

Trauma symptom patterns in a large sample of military personnel outpatients: Differential relations to trauma exposure, depression, and anxiety symptoms.

OBJECTIVE: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) results from experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event and is the most common clinical syndrome seen in military personnel. However, each patient experiences the impact of trauma differently exhibiting individual patterns of trauma symptoms. The current study endeavors to investigate individual patterns of trauma symptoms in military personnel and specifically analyze potential linkage and/or relation between blast exposure, anxiety, and depression. METHOD: We employed a person-centered approach of latent class analysis (LCA) to stratify 594 military personnel outpatients based on their response patterns in the Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI). Then, we related the resulting clusters to the number of blasts to which they were exposed, as well as to depression (Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale) and anxiety symptom severity (Beck Anxiety Inventory) using one-way analyses of variance with Bonferroni pairwise comparisons. RESULTS: We found three distinct clusters of traumatic symptoms: (a) Atypical response with low overall symptom burden, (b) increased response level and arousal, and (c) severe trauma symptom burden with tension-reduction behaviors. Individuals in Cluster 2 were exposed to significantly more blasts than in Cluster 1. Moreover, individuals in Cluster 3 reported the highest depression and anxiety symptom severities, followed by Cluster 2, followed by Cluster 1. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest heterogeneity among military personnel suffering from trauma and reveal their distinct relations to clinical comorbidities-emphasizing the role of person-centered, tailored approaches in clinical practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).