Association doesn’t mean causation. If you studied stressors in pregnancy (natural disasters, death of family members, etc.), and looked for 20 possible outcomes (IQ less than 100, autism (however defined), being short, heart defects, etc. etc.), statistically speaking, one of these (5%) would be higher than controls, just because of the nature of statistics. This doesn’t imply a definite result.
Also, stress hormones circulating in the mother’s blood, WILL end up affecting the developing fetus, as will everything else that she ingests - food, alcohol, drugs, tobacco smoke, carbon monoxide, toxins, etc.
I was very sorry that you did not mention the dangers of a pregnant woman being kicked by a cavalry horse, and thus engendering a lifetime fear of horses in the resultant child.
Let us not forget all the poor pregnant rats that were exposed to high levels of stress during their pregnancies, and as a result had male offspring that expressed signs of femininity and homotypical behavior.
However the best information I have available is that being born is only one stage in the development of a human foetus. It taking several months after that for final foetal stages to occur. In particular completion of formation/wiring of the brain.
The theory is that as humans vevolved into bipedality they were forced to birth the foetus earlier in comparison to four legged animals. This can be seen in say cats and dogs where the young have nearly fully developed brains and are able to operate independently in a very small bunver of weeks.
Getting to the article, I guess the thrust is about effects on a foetus in critical development stages. It should perhaps have tooked at immediate post-birth up to say 6 months age effects as well.
mlewitt, you’ve been around for a few months but are still sort of new-ish, so welcome! For future ref, when one starts a thread, it’s helpful to other readers to provide a link to the column in the opening post (OP.) Yes, it’s today’s column and on the front page, but in a week or so it will sink into the depths of the Archives. So a link helps others by avoiding searching time, and also helping to keep us on the same page. No biggie, you’ll know for next time, and I’ve edited the link into your post.
jezzaOZ: since there was already a thread on this topic, I merged your thread in, so that we’ve got one place for comments on this topic. Hope that’s OK.
No one disputes that things that happen to a baby can affect that baby’s development. The question the article was trying to address was the possibility of effects to the baby from events that occurred to the mother, especially events where there does not seem to be a direct mechanism.
For example, Cecil mentioned alcohol and drug use of the mother. It is fairly well understood and sensible that things the mother puts into her bloodstream will also go into the baby’s bloodstream. Thus the reason those things are not advised.
Hurricanes, or the death of another loved one like an older child, are something else. Unless the hurricane drops a house on the mom or submerges her in water for several hours or otherwise causes physical trauma to her, it is difficult to see a mechanism for affecting the fetal development. Except for the aforementioned stress hormones.
The problem is you’re waiting for outside circumstances you’re letting random chance affect your data. Maybe you should have a bunch of pregnant women do the ALS ice bucket challenge at random unexpected intervals and see if the babies turn out differently.
What about schizophrenia? Does having the flu while pregnant increase the chances of a child being born and it developing later? What DOES cause it, are you just born to have it? Sorry if I’m off track here, but I would like to know.
I suppose a good way to collect a large amount of data would be to study military wives. They tend to have a lot of similarities and you could even group them by their husbands rank. The high stress group includes those who were pregnant when their husbands were deployed. Extra stress points if their husband doesn’t come home again or if she became pregnant after he was deployed. I know when I was deployed it was very stressful for my wife and she wasn’t even pregnant.
That’s actually not a bad idea, the control group is military wives for soldiers not deployed overseas or not on active duty. Not exactly stress free, but no life is. Should provide some means of stress differential.
Anybody got any grant money? Who wants to write it up?
If you google ‘flu during pregnancy and schizophrenia’, several articles come up. The mother’s immune system response to the flu can produce proteins that affect the fetus. Bipolar and schizophrenia are definitely increased after a case of flu.
There’s a huge study in England for several decades that is looking at thousands of different metrics all around government civil servants in the UK. I know they’ve looked at pregnancy as part of that study but not sure if they have data that would allow analysis of stress and the resultant children, but I would expect so. Be a place to start anyway.