Prenatal Stress and Child Development

This book examines the complex impact of prenatal stress and the mechanism of its transmission on children’s development and well-being, including prenatal programming, epigenetics, infl ammatory processes, and the brain-gut microbiome. It analyzes current findings on prenatal stressors affecting pregnancy, including preconception stress, prenatal maternal depression, anxiety, and pregnancy-specific anxieties. Chapters explore how prenatal stress affects cognitive, affective, behavioral, and neurobiological development in children while pinpointing core processes of adaptation, resilience, and interventions that may reduce negative behaviors and promote optimal outcomes in children. Th is complex perspective on mechanisms by which early environmental influences interact with prenatal programming of susceptibility aims to inform clinical strategies and future research targeting prenatal stress and its cyclical impact on subsequent generations.

Key areas of coverage include:

• The developmental effects of prenatal maternal stress on children.
• Epigenetic effects of prenatal stress.
• Intergenerational transmission of parental early life stress.
• The microbiome-gut-brain axis and the effects of prenatal stress on early neurodevelopment.
• The effect of prenatal stress on parenting.
• Gestational stress and resilience.
• Prenatal stress and children’s sleeping behavior.
• Prenatal, perinatal, and population-based interventions to prevent psychopathology.

Prenatal Stress and Child Development is an essential resource for researchers, professors and graduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and related professionals in infancy and early childhood development, maternal and child health, developmental psychology, pediatrics, social work, child and adolescent psychiatry, developmental neuroscience, and related behavioral and social sciences and medical disciplines.

Excerpt from the foreword:

“I would make the plea that in addition to anyone with an interest in child development, this book should be essential reading for researchers pursuing “pre-clinical, basic science models of neurodevelopment and brain health”…. This book provides what in my mind is the most advanced compilation of existing knowledge and state-of-the-art science in the field of prenatal psychiatry/psychology (and perhaps in the entire field of prenatal medicine).  This volume can brilliantly serve to focus future directions in our understanding of the perinatal determinants of brain health.”

Michael J Meaney

James McGill Professor of Medicine

Translational Neuroscience Programme

Adjunct Professor of Paediatrics

Ashley Wazana, M.D., FRCPC, is an Associate Professor at McGill University and FRQS senior clinician-scientist at the Jewish General Hospital (JGH). He is the co-director of a psychiatric day hospital for Early Childhood Disorders. Dr. Wazana completed his psychiatry training at McGill University and then proceeded to obtain his second M.Sc. in Epidemiology at Columbia. He had the privilege to start working on the MAVAN project with Michael Meaney more than 10 years ago as a principal investigator for psychopathology outcomes of this prenatal cohort. His research activities focus on identifying how the early environment, and specifically parent-child interactions, modifies the developmental risk characterized by prenatal adversity and genetic susceptibility to predict childhood psychopathology. He leads an international consortium of comparable prenatal cohorts (DREAM BIG), which examines, in multiple harmonized datasets, the same complex model of prediction of psychopathology from prenatal origins.

Eszter Székely, Ph.D., is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. She obtained M.Sc. degrees in Child and Adolescent Psychology; Cognitive Neurosciences; and Epidemiology. Dr. Székely received her doctoral degree from Erasmus University Medical Centre (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) on the Dutch Generation R Study. In her first postdoctoral training at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, she combined large-scale genomic, longitudinal neuroimaging, behavioural and social network data to better understand the emergence of psychopathology, in particular ADHD. In her current research, Dr. Székely continues to combine data from multiple levels of function to better understand the sex-specific effects of prenatal adversity on child mental health.

Tim F. Oberlander, M.D., FRCPC, is the inaugural R. Howard Webster Professor in Brain Imaging and Child Development in the Department of Pediatrics, UBC, a clinician with the Child Development and Rehabilitation Program and attending physician with the BCCH Complex Pain Service. As a physician-scientist his work bridges developmental neurosciences and community child health. Dr. Oberlander's research seeks to understand how prenatal exposure to maternal mood disorders and exposure to antidepressants affects early development. A particular focus of his work studies how antidepressants (SSRIs) shape stress regulation and related behaviours during childhood. His research incorporates   methods that extend from studies of molecular/genetic factors to population outcomes. His work provides strong evidence that both maternal mood and in utero exposure to SSRI antidepressants influences childhood behaviour. Increasingly, his work is showing that SSRI exposure only explains a proportion of behavioural outcomes, and key biological and maternal also shape pathways leading to both vulnerability and resiliency. Even in the face of adversity, some children do very well and the goal of Dr. Oberlander's work is to figure out how and why this happens.