Research efforts during the past decades have provided intriguing evidence suggesting that stressful experiences during pregnancy exert long-term consequences on the future mental wellbeing of both the mother and her baby. Recent human epidemiological and animal studies indicate that stressful experiences in utero or during early life may increase the risk of neurological and psychiatric disord...

BACKGROUND Animal experiments have convincingly demonstrated that prenatal maternal stress affects pregnancy outcome and results in early programming of brain functions with permanent changes in neuroendocrine regulation and behaviour in offspring. AIM To evaluate the existing evidence of comparable effects of prenatal stress on human pregnancy and child development. STUDY DESIGN Data sourc...

Febrile seizures are childhood convulsions resulting from an infection that leads to an inflammatory response and subsequent convulsions. Prenatal stress has been shown to heighten the progression and intensity of febrile seizures. Current medications are costly and have adverse effects associated with prolonged use. Quercetin flavonoid exhibits anti-inflammatory, anti-convulsant, and anti-stre...

Prenatal ethanol (EtOH) exposure is associated with low birth weight, followed by increased appetite, catch-up growth, insulin resistance, and impaired glucose tolerance in the rat offspring. Because EtOH can induce oxidative stress, which is a putative mechanism of insulin resistance, and because of the central role of the hypothalamus in the regulation of energy homeostasis and insulin action...

Psychological stress during pregnancy increases the risk of childhood wheeze and asthma. However, the transmitting mechanisms remain largely unknown. Since epigenetic alterations have emerged as a link between perturbations in the prenatal environment and an increased disease risk we used whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) to analyze changes in DNA methylation in mothers and their childre...

Our objective is to evaluate the relationships between prenatal maternal stress and depressive symptoms, respectively, and infant neurodevelopment at 6 months, adjusted for heavy metals and oxidative stress. This research is a part of a multi-center birth cohort study in South Korea. Information on stress and depressive symptoms was collected during the first trimester using Psychosocial Well-B...

INTRODUCTION Our aim was to examine infants' behavioral and physiological stress responses to three weekly maternal separations, in relation to maternal prenatal psychosocial stress and cortisol. The hypothesis was that more prenatal stress and higher cortisol concentrations would predict smaller decreases in negative behavior and cortisol responses over the separations (i.e. less habituation)....

BACKGROUND A few recent studies have demonstrated heightened hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity to acute stress in animals exposed to heavy metal contaminants, particularly lead. However, Pb-induced dysregulation of the HPA axis has not yet been studied in humans. OBJECTIVE In this study, we examined children's cortisol response to acute stress (the glucocorticoid product of...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a collective trauma that may have enduring stress effects during sensitive periods, such as pregnancy. Prenatal result in epigenetic signatures of stress-related genes (e.g., the serotonin transporter gene, SLC6A4) turn influence infants’ behavioral development. In April 2020, we launched longitudinal cohort study to assess and vestiges COVID-19-related prenatal...

Prenatal stress (PNS) is associated with increased biological risk for mental disorders such as anxiety and depression later in life, and stress appear to be additive to the PNS influences. Among the most widely cited and accepted alternative hypotheses of anxiety and depression is dysfunction of the HPA axis, a system that is central in orchestrating the stress response. Therefore, understandi...