Prenatal maternal cortisol measures predict learning and short‐term memory performance in 3‐ but not 5‐month‐old infants

Abstract

Little is known about relations between maternal prenatal stress and specific cognitive processes—learning and memory—in infants. A modified crib-mobile task was employed in a longitudinal design to test relations between maternal prenatal cortisol, prenatal subjective stress and anxiety, psychosocial variables, and learning and memory in 3- and 5-month-old infants. Results revealed that maternal prenatal cortisol was affected by particular psychosocial variables (e.g., maternal age, whether or not the infant’s grandmother provided childcare, financial status), but was unrelated to measures of maternal depression, anxiety, and stress. Although maternal prenatal cortisol was not predictive of learning or memory performance in 5-month-old-infants, higher levels of basal maternal cortisol and reduced prenatal cortisol response was predictive of some learning and short-term memory measures in 3-month-old infants. These results suggest an influence of maternal neuroendocrine functioning on fetal neurological development, and the importance of separate examination of subjective and biological measures of stress.

“Does your baby watch TV?”: The associations between at‐home TV watching and laboratory challenge cortisol are different for young infants and their mothers

“…Consistent with previous findings when cortisol was measured in mothers during pregnancy (Thompson et al., 2017), we found that education and maternal age also explained variance in maternal cortisol for mothers with 3‐month‐old infants. In addition, at this age, our findings indicated that cortisol was lower for mothers that allowed infant TV exposure, compared to those that did not, at the T1 and T2 sampling intervals, but were not significantly lower until the T3 sampling interval, which could be tied to a reduction in the amount of variance in the T3 samples.…”

“…Infants participated in a modified “crib‐mobile” task (involving infants lying in a crib with visual stimuli above; for full details of this task, see Thompson et al., 2017) followed by a second “circumplex” task (paired presentations of visual and auditory stimuli utilizing a habituation procedure), which were designed to assess infant learning and memory, but the details of the tasks are not important for the present study. Most relevant are these features of the stimuli and design: (a) infants were in the arms of their mothers for T1 saliva sampling, and were then laid down in a crib and separated from their mothers for the crib‐mobile task, (b) after completing this task (approximately 21 min), they were briefly reunited with their mothers for T2 saliva sampling, (c) infants were again separated from their mothers and placed in chairs in front of a large TV screen for the circumplex task (approximately 21 min), and (d) after completing it, they were reunited with their mothers for T3 sampling.…”

“…The data reported here are derived from a longitudinal dataset investigating infant neuroendocrine response during learning and memory challenge tasks in 3‐ and 5‐month‐old infants, a portion of which are previously described in Thompson et al. (2017). In this study, demographic information was obtained that could be found to be associated in the present study with infant TV exposure, such as maternal education, income, whether she was breastfeeding, and infant temperament characteristics.…”

Characterizing prenatal maternal distress with unique prenatal cortisol trajectories.

“…However, as parturition nears, fetal exposure to cortisol is facilitated by a precipitous drop in 11␤-HSD2 levels, allowing more maternal GCs to cross the placenta to ensure maturation of critical development of organ systems, including the CNS (Ishimoto & Jaffe, 2011;Matthews, 2000;Seckl & Holmes, 2007;Shearer, Wyrwoll, & Holmes, 2019). Consistent with this normative pattern of fetal cortisol exposures, there is increasing evidence that relatively high maternal GCs in early gestation are associated with less optimal fetal and child development (Bergman, Sarkar, Glover, & O'Connor, 2010;Davis & Sandman, 2010;Glynn & Sandman, 2012;, whereas elevations later in gestation have been linked to salutary influences in the offspring (Davis, Head, Buss, & Sandman, 2017;Davis & Sandman, 2010;Ram, Howland, Sandman, Davis, & Glynn, 2019;Thompson, Morgan, Unger, & Covey, 2017). Similarly, elevated late gestational maternal cortisol is associated with benefits for the mother such as enhanced infant-directed affiliation in nonhuman primates (Bardi, French, Ramirez, & Brent, 2004).…”

Gene × Environment Interaction in Developmental Disorders: Where Do We Stand and What’s Next?

“…Among the early environmental factors, maternal lifestyle and prenatal factors play important roles and may trigger serious health consequences and diseases later in life ( Barua and Junaid, 2015 ). Some of the factors that have been found to influence normal fetal development include stress, diet, gestational diabetes, and exposure to alcohol during pregnancy (e.g., Barker, 2006 ; Bose et al, 2017 ; Salihu et al, 2017 ; Thompson et al, 2017 ). Unhealthy lifestyles generate epigenetic changes, including DNA methylation alteration and chromatin modifications, which are believed to account for various types of developmental disabilities related to brain plasticity, including neural tube defects and ASD ( Dunaway et al, 2016 ; Cataldo et al, 2017 , 2018 ).…”