Highlights
- The stress that some mothers experience during their pregnancies could influence the genetic makeup their babies are born with.
- A person's DNA sequences called telomeres //are essential for cellular replication and is a biomarker of aging.
- The children of mothers who had experienced increased psychosocial stress during pregnancy were found to have shorter telomeres.
Because telomeres shorten substantially as people grow older, researchers use telomere length (TL) as a biological indicator or biomarker of aging. TL at birth is therefore an indicator of biological ageing and associated age-related diseases.
Determining factors that could affect TL in newborns have become an important research endeavour. Environmental influences such as ultraviolet radiation and oxidative stress have already been shown to play a role in telomere length, while people with somatic and psychiatric disorders, including major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, have been found to have shorter TL.
A few smaller studies have also established a possible link between TL and the amount and type of stress that mothers experience during pregnancy.
Telomere Length Reflects Intensity of Stress
It included interviews and questionnaires involving the mothers on their lifestyle habits, the amount of stress they believe they had to cope with, whether they suffered from any psychological disorders and also on aspects of the father. Saliva samples were collected from the mothers and umbilical cord blood immediately after the babies' delivery to do genetic analyses.
Girls were also found to have significantly longer telomeres than boys. This finding supports previous evidence that TL differs between genders at birth. Whether a mother smoked or not during pregnancy influenced her own TL but not that of her offspring.
"Although the meaning of the reported differences in TL for later health is so far unclear, our findings underline the necessity to especially support women with increased risk of experiencing stress during pregnancy," emphasizes Send.
Reference
- Send, T. et al, Telomere length in newborns is related to maternal stress during pregnancy, Neuropsychopharmacology (2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npp.2017.73.
Source-Medindia