Prenatal COVID-19, maternal stress could affect infants’ attention span
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Key takeaways:
- High stress during pregnancy and prenatal infection may affect the attention span of infants.
- Findings indicate that maternal stress is a modifiable factor in negative outcomes from prenatal COVID-19 infection.
An NIH-funded study found a potential link between the combination of prenatal COVID-19 and maternal stress and an increased risk for impaired attention span in infants, according to findings reported in Pediatric Research.
One of the authors told Healio that the research focused on understanding how infants’ earliest experiences — beginning in utero — impact their brain development, and how variations in maternal health may foster or suppress healthy infant cognitive and emotional development.
“The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was a hugely stressful event for families across the globe,” Denise M. Werchan, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of child and adolescent psychology at New York University School of Medicine, told Healio.
“We wanted to understand mothers’ personal experiences during this stressful time and examine how these experiences may relate to their infants’ later development,” Werchan said. “Through this work, our hope is to identify aspects of maternal health that predict positive infant outcomes, which will help us to understand how we can support families during the already very stressful time following the birth of a new baby.”
Werchan and colleagues began their study by following 167 pregnant women in New York City starting in March 2020.
“The onset of the pandemic was an incredibly stressful and uncertain time in New York City,” Werchan said. “In addition to fears of contracting the virus, many families also experienced abrupt changes in their perinatal care, social support systems, work or schooling conditions, and financial situations. Our aim was to understand not only whether maternal COVID-19 infection may impact infant development, but also the effects of elevated psychosocial stress during pregnancy on infant outcomes.”
The researchers asked expectant mothers about mental health symptoms, such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress symptoms. These symptoms were combined with physical pregnancy symptoms into a prenatal psychosocial stress score.
“Once their babies were born, we used a standard attention assessment to measure their infants’ cognitive development when they were 6 months old,” Werchan said. “We also asked moms questions about their babies’ socioemotional skills once they were 1 year old.”
Out of 167 pregnant mothers, 50 had a positive COVID-19 test while pregnant, whereas the remaining 117 reported no symptoms or positive tests. Of the initial cohort, 99 mothers completed surveys on their child’s development.
The authors noticed that independently of each other, prenatal stress and COVID-19 infection were not related to infant outcomes at 6 months or 12 months, but in pregnancies that reported a positive COVID-19 test, higher prenatal stress was associated with poorer infant attention at 6 months of age and, thus, more likely to show possible delays in socioemotional functioning and cognition at 12 months.
“It was interesting that we saw no overall differences in infants of mothers who did or did not have COVID-19 during pregnancy,” Werchan said. “We only saw differences in infant development when mothers with COVID-19 also reported high levels of psychosocial stress during pregnancy. This could mean that making screening and treatment of mental health issues during pregnancy a regular part of perinatal care might have wide-reaching effects on supporting positive maternal and infant outcomes.”
She said the findings highlight “the importance of supporting moms during pregnancy and postpartum.”
“The time following the birth of a new baby is already a very stressful time, as moms are dealing with post-birth complications, lactation difficulties, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation, on top of the already incredibly demanding round-the-clock care of a newborn,” Werchan said. “Screening and treating symptoms of postpartum mental health issues, as well as increasing the support systems available to new moms, could have positive effects on infant outcomes.”
Werchan also noted that because the study consisted of only a single cohort of mothers and infants, and infants were tested only up to 1 year of age, it is “extremely important to replicate these findings in other cohorts” and continue following up with families to examine longer term outcomes. They plan to continue to follow the cohort into later ages to examine maternal stress on neurobehavioral development.
“Our lab is continuing to follow and test families through early childhood,” Werchan said. “This will be important for understanding the potential long-term impacts of the differences in infant attention that we observed, as well as the factors that may support positive child outcomes.”
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