Mother's stress during pregnancy affects baby's brain
New York: Confirming a long-held belief that stress during pregnancy is bad for the unborn kid, a new study has found that remaining stress-free during this period helps the brain development of the baby.
A mother's stress during pregnancy changes neural connectivity in the brain of her unborn child, according to the study presented at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Boston, Massachusetts.
"We have demonstrated what has long been theorised, but not yet observed in a human, which is that the stress of a mother during her pregnancy is reflected in connectional properties of her child's developing brain," said one of the researchers Moriah Thomason of Wayne State University in the US.
Research in newborns and older children to understand prenatal influences has been confounded by the postnatal environment, Thomason explained.
But recent advancements in foetal imaging allowed the researchers to gain insight into a critical time period in brain development never previously accessible.
Using foetal resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they examined functional connectivity in 47 human foetuses scanned between the 30th and 37th week of gestation.
The researchers recruited the participating mothers from a low-resource and high-stress urban setting, with many reporting high-levels of depression, anxiety, worry and stress.
They found that mothers reporting high stress had foetuses with a reduced efficiency in how their neural functional systems are organised.
The data suggests that the brain does not develop in a sequence from the simplest systems to more complex high-order systems, but perhaps instead first develops the areas that will be most critical in bridging across systems.
The researchers found that the cerebellum played a central role in the observed effects, suggesting it may be especially vulnerable to the effects of prenatal or early life stress.
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Pakistan reports two more polio cases; Total tally now 52
ISLAMABAD: At least two more cases of poliovirus were reported in Pakistan, taking the number of infections to 52 so far this year, a report said on Friday.
“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health has confirmed the detection of two more wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) cases in Pakistan," an official statement said.
The fresh infections — a boy and a girl — were reported from the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
“Genetic sequencing of the samples collected from the children is underway," the statement read. Dera Ismail Khan, one of the seven polio-endemic districts of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has reported five polio cases so far this year.
Of the 52 cases in the country this year, 24 are from Balochistan, 13 from Sindh, 13 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.
There is no cure for polio. Only multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five can keep them protected.
