As if the ever changing (and increasing!) laundry list of pregnancy do's and don'ts (Coffee? Sure! Um.....on second thought NO! Coffee = BAD!! Hey! New research says one or two cups a day should be fine! Go right ahead!) isn't stressful enough for gestating gal, a new study says that stress during pregnancy may lead to babies with a predisposition for asthma and allergies.

So while this information is of little comfort to a woman in her final trimester working overtime trying to make ends meet, the study of how stress affects humans is actually pretty fascinating.

In research using animals, stress in the pregnant mother ramped up the offspring's immune response to allergens, called immunoglobulin E or IgE. To test this out using human subjects, the IgE levels of 387 newborns in Boston were assessed with the same results: regardless of the the mother's race, class, education or smoking history, and in spite of low dust mite levels at home, the babies born to distressed mothers had high IgE levels in their cord blood.

A different stress study followed one thousand New Zealanders from birth to age 32. In that research, subjects who had undergone some sort of maltreatment - such as maternal rejection, harsh discipline or sexual abuse - had twice the levels of inflammation in their blood even 20 years later, showing that stress can leave a lasting impression on the body.

Other than stressing out already-stressed pregnant woman, what can be learned from this research? Since we can't eliminate all stressers in our lives, the answer might be to find better ways of coping with it. Free spa treatments and yoga classes with every positive pregnancy test?!