Exposure to prenatal stress is linked to health consequences in the offspring. The objective of this systematic review was to synthesize and critically appraise primary human studies that have examined the association between prenatal exposure to psychosocial stress, or adverse life events, stress hormones, and later risk of developing obesity. We searched Medline, Embase, ScienceDirect, WorldCat, and OpenGrey up to January 2019 to identify relevant literature. We critically appraised the identified studies, assessed their quality, and summarized their findings. From a total of 5930 search results and references of studies that authors considered pertinent, we identified 15 relevant studies among which three were of high quality and the rest were medium‐quality studies. We found direct association between exposure to stress in fetal life and different measures of obesity in the offspring in eight studies. The direct association was usually observed in studies that involved measurement of stress among mothers exposed to natural disasters. Due to lack of adequate and comparable data from the included studies, we did not conduct a meta‐analysis. We concluded that there may be direct association between prenatal stress and later obesity, but further research with more comparable sources of stressors is recommended.

中文翻译：

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妊娠期间母亲的压力与生命后期的后代肥胖风险之间的关联-一项系统的文献综述。

暴露于产前压力与后代的健康后果有关。这项系统评价的目的是综合并批判性地评估主要的人类研究，这些研究检查了产前暴露于社会心理压力或不良生活事件，压力荷尔蒙与后来发生肥胖症的风险之间的关系。我们搜索了截至2019年1月的Medline，Embase，ScienceDirect，WorldCat和OpenGrey，以查找相关文献。我们严格评估已鉴定的研究，评估其质量并总结其发现。从总共5930个搜索结果和作者认为相关的研究参考中，我们确定了15个相关研究，其中3个是高质量的，其余是中等质量的研究。在八项研究中，我们发现胎儿生命中的应激暴露与后代中肥胖的不同测量指标之间存在直接关联。在涉及测量遭受自然灾害的母亲之间的压力的研究中，通常观察到直接关联。由于所纳入研究缺乏足够的可比数据，因此我们未进行荟萃分析。我们得出的结论是，产前压力与后来的肥胖之间可能存在直接的关联，但是建议对压力源的可比性进行进一步的研究。