Maternal Corticotropin Releasing Hormone during pregnancy: A predictor for endocrine, cognitive and neural development in six- and seven-year-old children?

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A significant proportion of variation in health outcomes and disease risk is attributable to developmental processes during fetal life in response to various environmental, social, psychological, physiological and genetic influences. The aim of the current project is to determine the influence of prenatal exposure to stress on the volumes of the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in 6 to 7 year-old children. Extensive prenatal assessment has been obtained during the children’s mothers’ pregnancies and will be used to classify high risk individuals. Instead of relying exclusively on measures of maternal stress, measures of placental Corticotropin Releasing Hormone levels over the course of gestation will be used as evidence that the fetus has experienced and responded to a stress signal. Since the above mentioned brain structures are well known to be involved in emotional and cognitive processes, the relationship between structural brain alterations in association with prenatal stress exposure and behavioural characteristics will be studied. There is profound evidence that prenatal and early life stress programs endocrine function in later life. Therefore, the influence of prenatal stress exposure on the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis will also be assessed. Thus, the relationship between maternal stress during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental, endocrine and behavioural outcomes in the developing child will be elucidated. Studying such associations is necessary in order to understand the importance for interventions in high risk pregnancies.