Maternal attachment insecurity, maltreatment history, and depressive symptoms are associated with broad DNA methylation signatures in infants

Abstract

The early environment, including maternal characteristics, provides many cues to young organisms that shape their long-term physical and mental health. Identifying the earliest molecular events that precede observable developmental outcomes could help identify children in need of support prior to the onset of physical and mental health difficulties. In this study, we examined whether mothers’ attachment insecurity, maltreatment history, and depressive symptoms were associated with alterations in DNA methylation patterns in their infants, and whether these correlates in the infant epigenome were associated with socioemotional and behavioral functioning in toddlerhood. We recruited 156 women oversampled for histories of depression, who completed psychiatric interviews and depression screening during pregnancy, then provided follow-up behavioral data on their children at 18 months. Buccal cell DNA was obtained from 32 of their infants for a large-scale analysis of methylation patterns across 5×10 6 individual CpG dinucleotides, using clustering-based significance criteria to control for multiple comparisons. We found that tens of thousands of individual infant CpGs were alternatively methylated in association with maternal attachment insecurity, maltreatment in childhood, and antenatal and postpartum depressive symptoms, including genes implicated in developmental patterning, cell-cell communication, hormonal regulation, immune function/inflammatory response, and neurotransmission. Density of DNA methylation at selected genes from the result set was also significantly associated with toddler socioemotional and behavioral problems. This is the first report to identify novel regions of the human infant genome at which DNA methylation patterns are associated longitudinally both with maternal characteristics and with offspring socioemotional and behavioral problems in toddlerhood.

The impact of COVID-19 on a college freshman sample reveals genetic and nongenetic forms of susceptibility and resilience to stress

“…This would then represent a starting place for uncovering biological, cognitive, and/or social mechanisms that impart psychological resilience, especially in higher-risk populations. An example would be epigenetic changes induced by maternal characteristics that could contribute to the presence of psychological susceptibility or resilience under more severe stress ( 30 ).…”

Epigenome-wide association studies of prenatal maternal mental health and infant epigenetic profiles: a systematic review

“…2). Several articles described analyses of more than one exposure, resulting in 16 analyses [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] of maternal depression, 8 analyses [32,35,38,39,44,45,47,48] of maternal depression treatment, and 9 analyses [27,32,33,35,38,41,47,49,50] of maternal anxiety (Table S1). Based on STROBE and ROBINS-I criteria, we found that 13 analyses had a moderate risk of bias and 7 had a severe risk of bias (Tables S2 and S3).…”

Association between Maternal Perinatal Stress and Depression on Infant DNA Methylation in the First Year of Life

“…During the postnatal period, associations between postpartum stress and depression and child DNA methylation have not been extensively studied despite the established relationship between postpartum maternal mental health and child development. While evidence of an association between postpartum depressive symptoms and numerous differentially methylated gene regions have been identi ed in two studies using next-generation sequencing 44 and the Illumina EPIC array 45 respectively, more EWASs, candidate gene studies, and large-scale meta-analyses have yet to be conducted.…”