Confirming a long-held belief that stress during pregnancy is bad for the unborn kid, a new study has found that remaining stress-free during this period helps the brain development of the baby.<\/p>\n
A mother\u2019s stress during pregnancy changes neural connectivity in the brain of her unborn child, according to the study presented at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Boston, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have demonstrated what has long been theorised, but not yet observed in a human, which is that the stress of a mother during her pregnancy is reflected in connectional properties of her child\u2019s developing brain,\u201d said one of the researchers Moriah Thomason of Wayne State University in the US.<\/p>\n
Research in newborns and older children to understand prenatal influences has been confounded by the postnatal environment, Thomason explained.<\/p>\n
But recent advancements in foetal imaging allowed the researchers to gain insight into a critical time period in brain development never previously accessible.<\/p>\n
Using foetal resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they examined functional connectivity in 47 human foetuses scanned between the 30th and 37th week of gestation.<\/p>\n
The researchers recruited the participating mothers from a low-resource and high-stress urban setting, with many reporting high-levels of depression, anxiety, worry and stress.<\/p>\n
They found that mothers reporting high stress had foetuses with a reduced efficiency in how their neural functional systems are organised.<\/p>\n
The data suggests that the brain does not develop in a sequence from the simplest systems to more complex high-order systems, but perhaps instead first develops the areas that will be most critical in bridging across systems.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that the cerebellum played a central role in the observed effects, suggesting it may be especially vulnerable to the effects of prenatal or early life stress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Confirming a long-held belief that stress during pregnancy is bad for the unborn kid, a new study has found that remaining stress-free during this period helps the brain development of the baby. A mother\u2019s stress during pregnancy changes neural connectivity in the brain of her unborn child, according to the study presented at a meeting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26366,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26364\/revisions\/26366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}