Prenatal maternal stress affects size of the baby, study finds

Prenatal maternal stress affects size of the baby, study finds
November 29, 2017

A new study has been published that suggests babies are physically affected by the stress level of their mother during pregnancy. It has been previously found that adversity in the womb enhances or hampers offspring development and performance.

Researchers from The Universities of New Mexico and Göttingen, as well as the German Primate Center, have now proposed a hypothesis that largely predicts why there are highly variable patterns in the growth rates of disadvantaged offspring across 719 studies on 21 mammal species.

"The idea is that prenatal stress affects offspring in two different ways depending on the timing of the stressor during pregnancy -- yielding different outcomes before birth, after birth, and after weaning" says Andreas Berghänel, evolutionary anthropologist at The University of New Mexico and lead author of the study.

For example, prenatal maternal stress late in gestation causes mothers to invest less energy in their offspring, which leads to slower grow in the womb and during infancy. Once the baby has reached nutritional independence, however, they are no longer affected directly by their mother's provisioning, and consequently grow at the same rate as non-disadvantaged offspring. Thus, maternal stress late in gestation leads to slow growth during dependent phases, but doesn't affect growth later.

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