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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Turkish Foreign Minister says he discussed "gravity" of situation in Gaza with Egyptian counterpart
Istanbul: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Saturday that he discussed the “gravity” of the situation in Gaza with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry, along with efforts to step up humanitarian aid to the enclave.
"We especially emphasized the gravity of the situation at this point we have reached in Gaza and what needs to be done,” Fidan said in a joint news conference with Shoukry after a meeting in Istanbul.
“We discussed in detail with him what diplomatic steps can be taken, what can be done about humanitarian aid, what methods can be used for a two-state solution in the long term."
Commenting on tensions between Israel and Iran, Shoukry said they are concerned about the ongoing escalation in the region and have called on both parties to exercise restraint.
“Further military conflict threatens countries around the world,” he said.
“It threatens Egypt, it threatens Turkey, and our talks with the minister revolved around these developments in particular and the importance of joint efforts to contain the negative impacts.”
