Longitudinal prospective study examining the effects of the timing of prenatal stress on infant and child regulatory functioning: the Michigan Prenatal Stress Study protocol

Abstract

IntroductionA considerable literature implicates prenatal stress as a critical determinant of poor psychological functioning in childhood and beyond. However, knowledge about whether the timing of prenatal stress differentially influences the development of child outcomes, including psychopathology, is virtually unknown. The primary aim of our study is to examine how the timing of prenatal stress differentially affects early childhood regulatory functioning as a marker of psychopathology. Our second aim is to examine the mediating effects of maternal physiological and psychological factors during pregnancy. Our third aim is to examine the moderating effects of postnatal factors on child regulatory functioning. Our project is the first longitudinal, prospective, multimethod study addressing these questions.Methods and analysisOur ongoing study recruits pregnant women, oversampled for intimate partner violence (a common event-based stressor allowing examination of timing effects), with data collection starting at pregnancy week 15 and concluding 4 years post partum. We aim to have n=335 mother–child dyads. We conduct a granular assessment of pregnancy stress (measured weekly by maternal report) in order to reveal sensitive periods during fetal life when stress particularly derails later functioning. Pattern-based statistical analyses will be used to identify subgroups of women who differ in the timing of their stress during pregnancy and then test whether these patterns of stress differentially predict early childhood self-regulatory outcomes.Ethics and disseminationDue to the high-risk nature of our sample, care is taken to ensure protection of their well-being, including a safety plan for suicidal ideation and a safety mechanism (exit button in the online weekly survey) to protect participant data privacy. This study was approved by Michigan State University Institutional Review Board. Dissemination will be handled by data sharing through National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Data and Specimen Hub (DASH), as well as through publishing the findings in journals spanning behavioural neuroendocrinology to clinical and developmental psychology.

CBD enhances the cognitive score of adolescent rats prenatally exposed to THC and fine-tunes relevant effectors of hippocampal plasticity

“…As much as the gestational epoch is particularly sensitive to developmental threats ( Levendosky et al, 2021 ), adolescence is a time of high neural plasticity and a unique window of opportunity for “brain reprogramming” ( Levendosky et al, 2021 ; Tymofiyeva and Gaschler, 2021 ). Our hypothesis, in fact, is that the aberrant cognitive trajectories produced in the prenatal period by THC exposure could be rescued by the wide-spectrum activity of CBD.…”

Economic hardship predicts intimate partner violence victimization during pregnancy.

“…Data were drawn from a larger longitudinal study of the effects of prenatal stress on child and maternal physiological and behavioral outcomes (for a more complete overview of study methods, see Levendosky et al, 2021). Participants were recruited early in their pregnancies from several Midwest cities and towns and were oversampled for experiences of IPV, low income, and other stressors.…”