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According to the journal, Translational Psychiatry, an expecting mother's stress levels may impact her baby's development in utero, making it more susceptible to mental illness and behavioural problems later in life.
"This paper confirms that the early foundation years start at minus nine months," claims Dr. Carmine Pariante, an expert in the psychology of stress at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.
German researchers discovered that if the mother-to-be is highly stressed, a receptor in her fetus appears to undergo a biological change, which may compromise the child's future ability to cope with stress.
Although the study was small (25 women and children), and the moms studied were subjected to unusually high stress levels (all had violent partners), the preliminary findings certainly call for a broader study.
There is no discounting that socio-environmental factors play a role in a child's ability to handle stress. However, this study does suggest that the child's "earliest environment" -- the womb -- is crucial to its development.
Researchers pointed to an in utero change in the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) which helps regulate the body's hormonal response to stress, a change they believe is triggered by the mom-to-be's "poor state of emotional wellbeing" during her pregnancy.
When the babies were followed up one to two decades later as adolescents, they had changes in the genetics of their GR that other teenagers did not.
As the babies grew up with this altered GR, they were decidedly more hypersensitive to stress than other teens. Individually, they reacted impulsively, often struggling to manage their emotions.
Make sense, or does it sound like yet more junk science?