Socioeconomic Status During Pregnancy Linked to Child's Health

A new study links high cortisol levels in infants to the socioeconomic status of their mothers during pregnancy.

Researchers at the University of Colorado, Denver, said that women from poor socioeconomic backgrounds have elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, during pregnancy and give birth to infants with high levels of the hormone, placing them at a greater risk of developing serious diseases later in life.

This is the first study to measure the level of cortisol in infants and link it directly to the socioeconomic status of the mothers during pregnancy.

"There have been several studies relating cortisol levels in teenagers and adults to socioeconomic status, but this is the first to look at this relationship among pregnant women and their babies," said study author Zaneta Thayer, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at CU Denver, a major center of timely, topical and relevant research. "The results offer new insights into how health disparities can be inherited across generations."

Stress hormone cortisol is produced by the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. If this is overproduced it can trigger a group of chronic ailments that include cardiovascular disease and mental illness.

This study included 64 pregnant females from New Zealand. These women were evaluated for 19 key stress markers during pregnancy that included job loss, divorce, death of friend and physical or emotional abuse. Other questions included use of food banks or food grants due to lack of money for food, gone without fruits or vegetables to pay for other things, any help received in the form of clothes or money or purchase of cheap food.

"The babies of lower socioeconomic mothers had higher cortisol response to the stress of the vaccination," Thayer said. "Such changes have elsewhere been associated with differences in cognition, temperament and physical health."

"Our findings suggest that stressful social environments experienced by a mother impact her offspring...and that this is already detectable in the first weeks after birth," the study said. "These findings point to an early origin in social disparity-based differences in biological function."

The study was reported in the American Journal of Human Biology.