Archival ReportMaternal Exposure to Childhood Trauma Is Associated During Pregnancy With Placental-Fetal Stress Physiology
Section snippets
Participants
The study was conducted in a sociodemographically diverse cohort of 295 pregnant women attending prenatal care at two university-based medical centers in southern California (Table 1). All participants had singleton, intrauterine pregnancies with no known cord, placental, or uterine anomalies; fetal congenital malformations; or presence of any conditions known to be associated with dysregulated neuroendocrine function or corticosteroid medication use. All study procedures were approved by the
Results
Approximately half (57.3%) of the study participants reported no or low exposure to childhood trauma; 19.3% reported exposure to a single category of abuse or neglect; and 23.4% reported exposure to multiple types of maltreatment (Supplemental Table S1). The mean number of traumas (total CT) in the exposed population was 2.06 (±1.22 SD). The percentage of participants scoring above the cutoff for depression ranged between 7.8% and 11.1% at the different time points during pregnancy.
Compared
Discussion
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to establish an association between a woman’s exposure to trauma in her own childhood and placental-fetal stress physiology during pregnancy. Consistent with our hypothesis, pCRH production over gestation was significantly greater in women exposed to childhood trauma, with a graded effect such that exposure to two types of trauma (the mean number in the exposed group) corresponded to an almost 25% increase in pCRH concentrations toward the
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This work was supported, in part, by US Public Health Service (National Institutes of Health) Grant Nos. RO1 HD-060628, PO1 HD-047609, R01 HD-041696, R29 HD-33506 (all to PDW), RO1 MH-105538 (to CB, PDW, and Damien Fair), and R01 NS-41298 (to Curt Sandman).
The authors declare no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
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