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Nourish move love prenatal3/30/2023 The number of women who experience more severe forms of stress during their pregnancy is substantially lower. If this level of stress would lead to an impaired neurodevelopment of the unborn child following the fetal programming paradigm, the majority of children alive today would be affected. For example, in healthy populations of pregnant women across the globe, mild to moderate stress is reported by more than half of respondents. Mild to moderate stress is also highly common. It seems unlikely that all these types of stress induce a similar biochemical response in the pregnant women and that they have similar consequences for the offspring. Thus, stress is used as an umbrella term for a whole range of phenomena reflecting different types of negative experiences or feelings ranging from uncomfortable (mild) to extremely traumatic (severe). Another category is formed by the acute stress caused by natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or wars. Stress may refer to common daily hassles (e.g., work- or parenting-related), but also to severe traumatic experiences such as domestic violence or the death of a close relative. Furthermore, human studies on prenatal stress rely on observations of a wide variety of stressful experiences, traumatic events and mood disorders, which are commonly clustered under the term stress both in the scientific literature as well as in public press. This implies greater buffering of the negative effects of early-life stress in humans compared to animals. There is evidence that transient fluctuations in early experiences such as stress could have greater long-term impacts in small, short-lived species compared with large, long-lived species such as humans. Translating the findings from animal studies to human populations is challenging. Despite this heterogeneity in study methodology, the evidence is convergent in that in animals prenatal stress consistently leads to higher stress responses, more anxiety and depression-like behavior, and reduced cognitive abilities in the offspring. In addition, the strain of animals, the gestational age at which the stressor is applied, and the age of the offspring during the behavioral or cognitive tests differs widely between studies. The specific effects of the different forms of gestational stress on various types of behavior in the offspring are not entirely clear, since usually, only one type is included in an experimental model. Repeated restraint, social isolation, immobilization, noise exposure, strobe lighting, electric shocks, hypoxia, forced swim, exposure to cold, food deprivation, and administration of dexamethasone injections are some examples of stressful paradigms that have been applied in animal models. However, the type of stress applied in animal studies, typically in rodents, varies widely and also differs from the multifaceted phenomenon of stress as it is experienced by human beings. Until we have a better understanding, it seems counterproductive to alarm all pregnant women for possible harmful effects of all sorts of prenatal stress, if only to avoid the induction of stress itself.Īnimal models in which the effects of stress during pregnancy on offspring neurodevelopment were investigated, have demonstrated that applying various types of stress during gestation leads to anxiety- and depression-like behavioral patterns, impaired learning and attention deficits, and reduced social interaction in offspring. Furthermore, our limited knowledge on the possible underlying mechanisms and the effects of interventions for prenatal stress on child neurodevelopmental outcomes emphasize our incomplete understanding of the actual effects of prenatal stress on child neurodevelopment. Additionally, the vast majority of human studies are observational cohort studies that are hampered by their fundamental inability to show a causal relationship. Mild to moderate stress, experienced by many women during their pregnancy, has not consistently been shown to exert substantial negative effects on the child’s neurodevelopment. However, stress is an umbrella term and studies of maternal stress have focused on a wide range of stress inducing situations, ranging from daily hassles to traumatic stress after bereavement or a natural disaster. Furthermore, there are indications in human studies that severe prenatal stress has negative consequences for the child’s neurodevelopment. Results from animal studies suggest that gestational stress leads to an altered offspring neurodevelopment with adverse behavioral and cognitive consequences. There is increasing interest for the potential harmful effects of prenatal stress on the developing fetal brain, both in scientific literature and in public press.
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