Perinatal Psychological Distress and Child Brain Function and Behaviour Across Early Childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maternal psychological distress during the perinatal period, including both pregnancy and the early postpartum months, is a prevalent public health concern related to a range of child developmental outcomes. While relationships between perinatal distress and child behaviour have been documented, the role of early brain function in shaping these associations remains less clear, especially when examined across repeated developmental assessments. This thesis examined whether prenatal distress is associated with trajectories of brain network development from infancy to early childhood, as well as the role of functional brain connectivity in associations between perinatal maternal distress and child behaviour leveraging data from the Canada-wide Pregnancy during the COVID-19 Pandemic (PdP) study. For both studies, prenatal and postnatal maternal depression and anxiety were measured using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) and the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Anxiety Adult 7-item short form. In the first study, resting-state fMRI data were collected at 2 years of age (n = 62) in Calgary and Vancouver, and used to assess functional connectivity in the default mode, executive control, left frontoparietal, and sensorimotor networks. Child behaviour was measured using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ-3) at 2 and 3 years of age. Higher prenatal and postnatal distress were associated with lower ASQ-3 scores across all five developmental domains by 3 years of age. Postnatal distress was also linked to lower gross motor and personal-social scores at 2 years. However, functional connectivity at 2 years was not significantly associated with either maternal distress or behavioural outcomes. In the second study, resting-state fMRI data collected at 3 months, 1 year, 2 years, and 3 years of age (n = 217 scans, 178 individuals) in Calgary, Vancouver, and Montreal were analyzed to examine developmental changes in network connectivity and their associations with prenatal distress. Frontoparietal connectivity increased, and sensorimotor connectivity decreased from 3 months to 3 years of age. Prenatal maternal distress was not associated with altered connectivity trajectories. Together, these studies suggest that perinatal maternal distress is associated with behavioural differences in children during the first 3 years of life, but brain network development is relatively stable in the context of such exposures. These findings highlight the importance of routine and ongoing screening for maternal psychological distress both during pregnancy and the postpartum period, to support early identification and intervention for families who may benefit from additional support.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".