Effects of exposure to maternal psychosocial stress and stress hormones during peregnancy on endocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic and immune parameters in 6-7 year old children: a prospective cohort study

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Empirical studies support a significant role for prenatal stress exposure as an independent risk factor for a host of adverse infant and adult health outcomes. In humans, the major limitations in this field are that an overwhelming majority of these studies have (a) employed a retrospective design, and (b) used indirect markers of adverse prenatal conditions such as reduced birth weight/size and length of gestation as predictors of subsequent health outcomes. To address the above limitations, the goal of the present study proposal is to prospectively assess the effects of prenatal stress exposure (psychosocial stress of the mother during pregnancy and maternal-placental stress hormone levels during pregnancy) on endocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic and immune parameters in 6-7 year old children whose mothers’ pregnancies were followed with multiple serial measures. Moreover, instead of relying exclusively on self-report measures of maternal psychosocial stress collected during pregnancy, measures of maternal-placental stress hormones (levels of cortisol and corticotropin releasing hormone, CRH) that also were collected at multiple time points over the course of the index pregnancy will be used as biological markers of fetal exposure to a prenatal stress. Results of the proposed study will contribute to further understand whether conditions during fetal development account for variation in the function of important biological systems that underlie subsequent health and disease risk.