Prenatal stress is detrimental to a child’s developing brain. Researchers think there might be a way to reduce the damage done by helping children in their first years build strong adaptive skills.
A new study published in Developmental Neuroscience suggests that teaching children to be independent and interact with their environment could help soften or reduce the negative effects of stress experienced during pregnancy.
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Researchers at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and Queens College studied children exposed in utero to Superstorm Sandy in 2012 as a model of prenatal stress caused by a natural disaster. The study included a small pilot sample of 11 children with prenatal exposure and 23 without.
Between the ages of 2 and 6, researchers regularly observed and measured the children’s everyday skills, such as communication, self-care, and social behaviour.
At age 8, the small group of children underwent brain scans, testing reactions such as recognition of emotional facial expressions - a task that activates brain regions involved in processing emotions.
The results showed a clear pattern.
The “brain’s remarkable capacity for resilience”
Children who had been exposed to stress during the pregnancy showed a slight trend toward lower adaptive behaviours and reduced brain activity in emotion-related regions.
But these effects were closely related to the adaptive skills they had developed in their early childhood: The children exposed to prenatal stress that had developed adaptive skills showed brain activity similar to that of non-exposed children.
“From a neuroimaging standpoint, these findings highlight the brain’s remarkable capacity for resilience,” said Duke Shereen, PhD, director of Neuroimaging Core at the CUNY ASRC.
Children with lower adaptive skills showed reduced activity in key emotional brain regions, including the limbic system, which plays an important role in regulating emotions, processing sensory information, and forming memories.
Learning everyday skills can support brain health
“This suggests that what happens in those early developmental years really matters for how the brain responds later,” said Donato DeIngeniis, a PhD student in psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
In other words, the results suggest that early interventions focused on everyday skills could support brain resilience in children exposed to stress before birth.
The authors of the study emphasise that this is preliminary evidence from a small study, and larger studies are needed to confirm it.
However, as natural disasters become more frequent due to climate change, more pregnant women are likely to experience significant stress, said lead researcher Yoko Nomura.The findings support focusing early interventions on building children’s adaptive skills, she added, not only for behaviour but also as a possible way to protect brain health.
