Maternal pregnancy-specific anxiety is associated with child executive function at 6–9 years age

Abstract

Because fetal brain development proceeds at an extremely rapid pace, early life experiences have the potential to alter the trajectory of neurodevelopment, which may increase susceptibility for developmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. There is evidence that prenatal maternal stress and anxiety, especially worries specifically related to being pregnant, influence neurodevelopmental outcomes. In the current prospective longitudinal study, we included 89 women for whom serial data were available for pregnancy-specific anxiety, state anxiety, and depression at 15, 19, 25, 31, and 37 weeks gestation. When the offspring from the target pregnancy were between 6 and 9 years of age, their executive function was assessed. High levels of mean maternal pregnancy-specific anxiety over the course of gestation were associated with lower inhibitory control in girls only and lower visuospatial working memory performance in boys and girls. Higher-state anxiety and depression also were associated with lower visuospatial working memory performance. However, neither state anxiety nor depression explained any additional variance after accounting for pregnancy-specific anxiety. The findings contribute to the literature supporting an association between pregnancy-specific anxiety and cognitive development and extend our knowledge about the persistence of this effect until middle childhood.

Maternal cortisol over the course of pregnancy and subsequent child amygdala and hippocampus volumes and affective problems

“…The fact that a similar concentration of cortisol is associated with different consequences in boys and girls suggests a sex-specific programming effect, i.e., the same environmental cue is not associated with the same outcome in boys and girls. There are several examples in the animal and human literature to suggest many prenatal insults produce outcome-specific sexually dimorphic developmental consequences (33,60,(62)(63)(64). Mechanisms that have been discussed in this context include the presence of sex-specific placental adaptation to stress exposure (65) and the notion of increased susceptibility of the female brain to its milieu given the more rapid neurodevelopmental trajectory in females compared with males (66,67).…”

“…Sex. Because many animal and human studies suggest that fetal/child sex may moderate the effects of pre-or postnatal exposures on developmental outcomes (62,63,94), we included an interaction term between maternal prenatal cortisol and sex of the child in all our statistical models (SI Materials and Methods provides further details).…”

Oxytocin pathways in the intergenerational transmission of maternal early life stress

“…Accumulating evidence suggests that exposure to maternal stress during intrauterine life may result in an increased propensity of the offspring to develop behavioral or emotional problems (Buss et al, 2012), as well as cognitive developmental delays (Bergman et al, 2007; Buss et al, 2011; Glover, 2015). Importantly, these prenatally programmed offspring phenotypes may also influence the mothers’ reaction to the child, an aspect of the reciprocal mother-offspring relationship that is oftentimes underestimated.…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Stress in Humans

“…It is hypothesized that high levels of stress can affect offspring brain development, which may be reflected by changes in cognitive abilities. Adolescent offspring of mothers who experienced high levels of anxiety during weeks 12-22 of their pregnancy responded more impulsively and had difficulties organizing their cognitive resources (Van den Bergh et al, 2005;Mennes et al, 2006) High levels of maternal anxiety during gestation have been associated with lower inhibitory control in girls on a Flanker task and lower visuospatial working memory performance in boys and girls on a sequential memory task (Buss et al, 2011). Toddlers of mothers who experienced higher levels of objective stress exposure while pregnancy during the 1998 Québec ice storm exhibited lower intellectual abilities (as measured by Bayley Mental Development Index) and productive language abilities than toddlers of mothers who experienced lower levels of objectively defined prenatal stress.…”