Maternal Stress in Pregnancy: Considerations for Fetal Development

Abstract

There is significant current interest in the degree to which prenatal exposures, including maternal psychological factors, influence child outcomes. Studies that detect an association between prenatal maternal psychological distress and child developmental outcomes are subject to a number of interpretative challenges in the inference of causality. Some of these are common to many types of prenatal exposures that must necessarily rely on observational designs. Such challenges include the correlation between prenatal and postnatal exposures and the potential role of other sources of shared influence, such as genetic factors. Others are more specific to this area of research. These include: confounding between maternal report of child outcomes and the maternal psychological attributes under study; difficulties in distinguishing maternal stress from more ubiquitous aspects of maternal personality; and the lack of association between cortisol and measures of maternal psychological stress. This article considers these methodological issues and offers an additional methodology focused on fetal neurobehavior for discerning potential mechanisms that may mediate associations between maternal psychological functioning and the developing fetal nervous system.

Influence of prenatal maternal stress on umbilical cord blood cytokine levels

“…Thus far, evidence has linked stress to prolonged stimulatory effects on neuroimmunoregulatory pathways (such as sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis), which subsequently contribute to an alteration in immuno-development and functioning (Dunkel Schetter 2011;McEwen 2007;Sapolsky 2004). Children are considered particularly vulnerable to unfavorable stressing of these pathways, especially in early life, including the fetal state, during the development and growth of these systems (Dipietro 2012). Our understanding of the transition of stressresponse in mother to fetus still lacks causality, though several explanatory mechanisms have been suggested in literature, including transplacental transfer of stress mediators and maternal stress-response activation of placental release of neuroendocrine stress transmitters in the fetus (Glover 2015).…”

Human Gut Microbiota and Obesity During Development

“…There is evidence for the importance of the prenatal period in the health and development of ofspring throughout childhood and adult life [22].…”

Diferencias individuales en modelos animales: un enfoque para el estudio de factores neurobiológicos relacionados con depresión

“…Esto es particularmente cierto en los primeros estadios como el desarrollo fetal, la infancia y la adolescencia, en los cuales los individuos presentan una alta vulnerabilidad al efecto de factores ambientales estresantes, (Casey et al, 2008;Dipietro, 2012).…”