According to a recent study published by Yang et al in JACC: Heart Failure, prenatal stress in the form of severe maternal bereavement may predispose offspring to the risk of heart failure. Investigators used the 1973 to 2016 Danish and 1973 to 2014 Swedish Medical Birth Registers to examine the outcomes of nearly 6.8 million live single births. The investigators assessed maternal bereavement based on whether close family members of the pregnant patients had died prior to birth as well as incidences of heart failure from 1973 to 2016 in the Danish population and to 2020 in the Swedish population. After a follow-up of 48 years, they identified 4,812 cases of heart failure and found that maternal loss of any close family member was not correlated with a predisposition for heart failure in the offspring (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] = 1.04, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.88–1.23). However, when maternal bereavement was in response to the unnatural death of a relative (adjusted HR = 2.77, 95% CI = 1.49–5.17) or the loss of a partner or older child (adjusted HR = 1.47, 95% CI = 1.06–2.04), and therefore more severe, offspring were more likely to experience heart failure. In a companion press release on the findings from the American College of Cardiology, the study authors concluded: “We found that only the most severe forms of maternal bereavement were associated with the offspring’s risk of heart failure up to middle age. Whether mental health or other types of stress … could influence the risk of heart failure—not only at young age, but also in older ages than we could study in the current cohort—would need to be determined in future studies.”