Infant stress linked to teen brain changes
Girls showed changes in brain regions that regulate emotions
The effects of a baby’s rough start can linger. An early stressful environment during a baby girl’s first year was associated with altered brain behavior and signs of anxiety in her late teens, scientists report online November 11 in Nature Neuroscience.
Although the results are preliminary, they may help reveal how negative experiences early on can sculpt the brain.
Studies in animals have pointed out how tough times in childhood can influence the brain and the animals’ behavior later in life. But it’s been hard to figure out how that process works in people, says Lawrence Price, a psychiatrist and clinical neuroscientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “One of the real advances of this paper is that it helps move us along on that pathway,” he says.
The study, led by Cory Burghy of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew from the Wisconsin Study of Family and Work, which in 1990 recruited pregnant women in southern Wisconsin at prenatal visits. Three times during the first year of their babies’ lives, the mothers reported whether they were experiencing stressful situations such as depression, marital conflict, money woes or parenting stress. Researchers assumed that women who reported higher stress levels created a more stressful situation for their baby.