- Children whose mothers had been exposed to significant objective prenatal maternal stress (e.g., the number of days without power) had lower IQs. These children had less-developed language and cognitive skills than those whose mothers had not experienced such a high level of objective stress.
- The higher the level of the mothers’ objective difficulties (e.g., the length of the power outage) due to the ice storm, the more severe their children’s autistic traits were at the age of 6½ years.
It should be noted that many of these associations are moderated by the timing (trimester) of the exposure during gestation or by the child’s gender.In this lesson, Prof Suzanne King speaks about how the maternal hardships have an impact on the unborn child.
Prof. Suzanne King is Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University as well as a principle investigator at the McGill-affiliated Douglas Mental Health University Institute, both in Montreal, Canada. She studies developmental psychopathology, and the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD). In the past, she has used retrospective research with schizophrenia patients and controls. Currently, her work is focused on 3 prospective longitudinal studies of children who were exposed to maternal stress in utero as the result of a natural disaster: The Quebec ice storm of 1998; Iowa floods of 2008; and Queensland floods in Australia in 2011. Developmental outcomes include cognitive development (incl. IQ, language, memory, attention), physical development (incl. body composition and obesity, metabolism, brain structure, immunity, craniofacial dysmorphology, epigenetics), behavioral development (incl. internalizing, externalizing, autistic- or psychotic-like traits) and motor development (incl. balance, coordination, fine motor, visual motor integration).