Prenatal Maternal Stress Linked to Asthma and Autism in Children

Prenatal maternal stress leads to the development of asthma and autism in children, a new study reveals.

A team from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in collaboration with scientists at McGill University focused on women who were pregnant during the 1998 January Quebec Storm, which plunged more than 3 million Quebecers into darkness for almost 45 days.

The researchers looked at the effects of the stress on the development of the children.  To proceed with the study, the researchers evaluated the degree to which the mother's objective hardship from the storm and the subjective degree of distress explained the differences among those children displaying asthma like symptoms and autism-like traits.

The researchers however highlight that the children who were enrolled in the study did not have a history of autism and the results present the normal variation among children.

It was seen that more the mother's objective hardship from the ice storms, greater was the mother's anguish about the ice storm after 5 months.  And the children born to these women had severe autistic like traits at age 6.

These traits also included difficulty in socializing, feeling clumsy, speech problems and more.  The effect of stress was higher when the ice storm occurred during the first trimester. Children born to mothers who displayed high levels of hardship from ice storm and low levels of distress had extremely severe symptoms.

"We have found effects of the mothers' objective hardship from the ice storm (such as the number of days without electricity), or their degree of distress from the storm, on every aspect of child development that we have studied, said Suzanne King, PhD, the senior author of the paper. This is surprising, since the children in our study are mostly from upper class families and are generally doing extremely well in school and in life."

Previously, the same research team found that girls born to mothers with high levels of distress after the ice storm were more vulnerable to suffer from wheezing and be diagnosed with asthma. Boys showed no such effect.

The finding was documented in the journal Psychiatry Research.