Trauma Prior To Pregnancy Found To Affect Behaviour Of Offspring

May 12, 2009 by tanya
Filed under: Baby Health, News

Researchers at the University of Haifa have found that the trauma mother rats experience before getting pregnant will affect the behavior of their offspring.

Prof. Micah Leshem, who lead the study said “The findings show that trauma from a mother’s past, which does not directly impact her pregnancy, will affect her offspring’s emotional and social behavior. We should consider whether such effects occur in humans too,”

Their findings have been published in the journal Developmental Psychology.

Earlier studies have researched trauma during pregnancy, this is the first study to investigate trauma prior to conception.

Rats were used in the investigation as they have found to behave socially in a similar way to humans. Researchers divided the rats into three groups, the first group were submitted to stress two weeks before mating, allowing the mothers some time to recover before they conceived.

The second group was submitted to one week of stress and not given any recovery period before they conceived.

In the final group, the control rats, they were not submitted to any stress.

Once the offspring of the rats had matured and were over 60 days old, their social and emotional behavior, such as amount of anxiety and depression, was evaluated.

The study found that the offspring of females who had experienced trauma before they were conceived displayed different behavior to the offspring of rats from the control group.

Offspring of mothers who had been stressed had less social interaction, with female offspring suffering from higher levels of anxiety. Male offspring of the stressed mothers displayed less anxiety.

Rats from the offspring of the second group where they had been conceived immediately after trauma were found to be hyperactive. This implied that the amount of time between the trauma and conception was important.

Prof. Leshem said “Everyone knows that smoking harms the fetus and therefore a mother must not smoke during pregnancy. The findings of the present study show that adversity from a mother’s past, even well before her pregnancy, does affect her offspring, even when they are adult. We should be prepared for analogous effects in humans: for example, in children born to mothers who may have been exposed to war well before becoming pregnant,”