A potential psychological mechanism linking disaster-related prenatal maternal stress with child cognitive and motor development at 16 months: The QF2011 Queensland Flood Study.

Abstract

Fetal exposure to prenatal maternal stress can have lifelong consequences, with different types of maternal stress associated with different areas of child development. Fewer studies have focused on motor skills, even though they are strongly predictive of later development across a range of domains. Research on mechanisms of transmission has identified biological cascades of stress reactions, yet links between psychological stress reactions are rarely studied. This study investigates the relationship between different aspects of disaster-related prenatal maternal stress and child cognitive and motor development, and proposes a cascade of stress reactions as a potential mechanism of transmission. Mothers in the Queensland Flood Study (QF2011) exposed to a major flood during pregnancy completed questionnaires assessing flood exposure, symptoms of peritraumatic distress, dissociation, and posttraumatic stress (PTSD), and cognitive appraisal of the overall flood consequences. At 16 months post-partum, children's (N = 145) cognitive and motor development was assessed using the Bayley-III. Flood exposure predicted child cognitive development and maternal PTSD symptoms and negative cognitive appraisal were significantly negatively related to child motor development, with all relationships moderated by timing of exposure. Together, a cascade of stress reactions linked maternal flood exposure to poorer fine motor development. These findings suggest that the way stress reactions operate together is as important as the way they operate in isolation, and identifies a potential psychological mechanism of transmission for the effects of prenatal stress. Results have implications for conceptualizing prenatal stress research and optimizing child development in the wake of natural disasters. (PsycINFO Database Record

Infant Neurodevelopment is Affected by Prenatal Maternal Stress: The QF2011 Queensland Flood Study

“…This timing effect may be due to the effects of PNMS on the fetal cerebellum, which develops in the third trimester and has been implicated in problems involving social and interpersonal skills such as autism (Brambilla et al., ). This result is consistent with Project Ice Storm's finding of third trimester vulnerability for motor skills at age 5 years, and our own replication of this finding in QF2011 using the ASQ motor scales (Simcock et al., ) and the Bayley motor score (Moss et al., in revision) in infancy. The association between early motor skills and social behavior has been increasingly recognized in the literature (Campos et al., ).…”

Sex Differences in Vulnerability to Prenatal Stress: a Review of the Recent Literature

“…In the second ( N = 145), there was a near-significant interaction between maternal negative cognitive appraisal of flood-related stress and child sex predicting 16-month gross motor skills. Negative cognitive appraisal of the disaster was associated with poorer motor development among girls but not boys [66]. Bandoli et al examined effects of prenatal alcohol exposure and maternal depression on child psychomotor development at 6 and 12 months of age ( N  = 344).…”

“…Simcock et al ( N  = 115) found a sex interaction in the association between disaster-related PNMS and child problem solving at age 6 months, with girls having poorer problem solving than boys at high levels of prenatal stress [48]. In contrast, Moss et al ( N  = 145) found no evidence of sex dependence in the association between PNMS and adolescent cognitive development [66]. In the final paper from this group ( N  = 130), there was a sex-specific effect whereby PNMS was associated with poorer theory of mind in 30-month-old girls but not boys [67].…”

“…To further complicate matters, a number of studies have shown that PNMS x sex interactions are dependent on other factors, creating higher-order interactions. The most well-established of these factors is timing of exposure [77, 78], which was highlighted by many studies in this review [29, 36, 39, 43, 46, 49, 54, 66, 70•]. Finally, including child sex as a moderator may be insufficient: Evaluating PNMS programming may require entirely different models with different functional forms for girls and boys.…”

Infant Behavior and Competence Following Prenatal Exposure to a Natural Disaster: The QF2011 Queensland Flood Study

“…Results to date suggest that children exposed to the Queensland floods prenatally demonstrate alterations in development across a range of domains (Austin et al., ; Moss et al., ; Simcock, Laplante, et al., ). Regarding behavioral development, mothers reporting greater flood‐related objective hardship (e.g., extent of property damage), and subjective stress (peritraumatic, posttraumatic, and cognitive reactions) were more likely to describe their 6‐month‐old infants as exhibiting more difficult aspects of temperament, with the specific impacts dependent on infant sex and timing of exposure (Simcock, Elgbeili, et al., ).…”