Maternal preeclampsia and early childhood development: a cohort study in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Preeclampsia is a pregnancy-induced hypertensive disorder and is known to negatively impact maternal and child health. The relationship between maternal preeclampsia and child development remains underexplored, with existing studies generating mixed findings. This study aims to determine whether prenatal exposure to preeclampsia is associated with child developmental vulnerability. Methods This population-based cohort study includes 59,508 (51.4% female) singleton live births occurring between 2012 and 2017 in British Columbia (BC), Canada. The births were identified in the BC Vital Statistics Birth database and were linked to the Early Development Instrument (EDI) surveys completed by kindergarten teachers around age 5. The primary outcome assessed was child developmental vulnerability defined using the provincial cut-off score of lowest 10th percentile on any two of the five EDI domains: physical wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication skill. Adjusted Risk Ratios (aRR) and 95% Confidence Intervals (CIs) were computed from modified Poisson regression models, adjusting for a wide range of maternal sociodemographic and comorbid factors. Results The proportion of children prenatally exposed to preeclampsia was 2.0%. Developmental vulnerability was identified in 25.8% of exposed children, compared with 18.8% of those unexposed. Exposure to preeclampsia was associated with 33% higher risk of developmental vulnerability in the adjusted model (aRR 1.33; 95% CI: 1.21, 1.46). The association was consistently observed across all EDI outcomes. Early onset preeclampsia showed 1.54-fold higher risk of developmental vulnerability (95% CI: 1.23, 1.94), while late onset preeclampsia showed a 1.30-fold higher risk (95% CI: 1.17, 1.44). Conclusions Maternal preeclampsia may increase the risk of developmental vulnerability at school entry. Further research is warranted to examine the mechanistic pathways. Key messages • By demonstrating a robust association between maternal preeclampsia and early age developmental challenges, this study provides strong evidence supporting the fetal programming of child development. • The findings underscore the need for early detection and prevention of preeclampsia as well as targeted early interventions for children prenatally exposed to this condition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".