Prenatal stress
Health risks include impaired cognitive development, low birth weight, mental disorders, and gender specific deficits in the offspring.
[4] Some research includes studies like McKenna et al. suggesting that the idea of pregnancy can cause an increased risk of psychopathology and these exposures during gestation impacts epigenetic.
[5] The mother's usage of selective serotonin repute inhibitors (SSRIs) was observed while the epigenetic age of the child was calculated through fetal umbilical cord blood.
[6] Another study, Brannigan et al. focused on how prenatal stress contributes to personality disorders by looking at children decades later born from mothers who spent time in a mental health clinic in Finland.
[9] However, as demonstrated by Sandman and Davis, the timing of cortisol release can sometimes have a harmful effect on development and sometimes not depending on when in pregnancy stress is experienced.
Sandman and Davis studied "125 full- term infants at 3, 6, and 12 months of age"[8] to determine the effects of maternal cortisol timing differences on development.
[8] Furthermore, prenatal stress can have an effect on fetal development by causing obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other problems.
Poor eating habits and lack of physical activity are not the only contributing factors to prenatal stress on the baby.
[11] Since there is such a large amount of growth occurring during this time-period in the child's life, there are a lot of outside factors in the environment that can affect this development.
[10] The resulting effects can impact many different areas of the developing child's brain, such as the hypothalamus, corpus callosum, amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum.
[13] This research showed that there were impacts psychologically on the children who were exposed to this type of stress in the womb, in terms of increased risk for developing childhood psychopathologies.
Prenatal distress has been shown to increase the risk that the offspring will develop a mental disorder as well as the severity of some symptoms.
Maternal exposure to excess dihydrotestosterone, progestin, and norethindrone have been linked to a higher risk of offspring developing ASD.
[18] This is notable due to the important role of the PFC right hemisphere which is behavioral inhibition, a common struggle for individuals with ADHD.
A 2019 study found that prenatal distress, specifically during the first 20 weeks of gestation, was linked to higher mood dysregulation and lower grey matter (GM) volume.
[20] The reduction of GM volume is impactful in many negative ways which is another contributing factor that can lead to the development of mental disorders in children that experience in utero stress.
They are made up of the same short DNA sequence that is repeated multiple times and serve to protect the ends of chromosomes so they do not become damaged.
Authors suggest this may cause the reduced in the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area and says it is similar to the effects of neonatal castration.
[28] Another study led by Kerchner et al. investigated the volume of the medial amygdala and the two compartments posterodorsal and the posteroventral in mice that also were prenatally stressed.
The prenatally stressed male pups showed a significant latency in mounting behavior when compared to controls.
Researchers conducted a study by developing a questionnaire for pregnant women that included age, sex, race, health insurance status, financial status, any pregnancy risks, medical conditions, treatments, doctor's appointments, how many appointments were canceled due to COVID-19, and stress levels on a scale of mild, moderate, and severe.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction has been demonstrated to reduce anxiety and depression for people with stress-related and chronic medical conditions.
[38] One pilot study shows promise for the potential of a mindfulness-based intervention to reduce negative affect and anxiety of women during pregnancy.
Based out of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, investigators Dr. Cassandra Vieten and Dr. John Astin conducted a wait-list control pilot study that tested a group-based mindfulness intervention.
This study is a promising start to the potential impact that mindfulness based interventions could have on reducing prenatal stress, and thereby improving child outcomes.
