Babies born during pandemic showing slight delays in developmental skills

 

• A new study on babies born during the pandemic found some had lower gross motor, fine motor and social skills than pre-pandemic babies.
• Researchers believe pregnant mothers experiencing pandemic related stress may have caused the drop in developmental scores.
• The lower developmental scores were small shifts in average scores between groups, but researchers emphasized it’s important to pay attention to.

The pandemic has upended normal life for most people, prompting some to lose jobs, attend school from home and limit time spent with friends. Now scientists have discovered that even babies have felt the stress, with some born during the coronavirus pandemic experiencing slight developmental delays.

In new research published on Tuesday, a group of researchers studied 255 infants born between March and December 2020 and found that average developmental scores among babies born during the pandemic, whether their mothers had COVID-19 during pregnancy or not, were lower than the gross motor, fine motor and social skills of 62 pre-pandemic babies.

Dani Dumitriu, assistant professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Columbia University and lead investigator of the study, explained that the results suggest the huge amount of stress felt by pregnant mothers during the pandemic may have played a role.

“The developmental trajectory of an infant begins before birth. With potentially millions of infants who may have been exposed to COVID in utero, and even more mothers just living through the stress of the pandemic, there is a critical need to understand the neurodevelopmental effects of the pandemic on future generations,” said Dumitriu.

Last year, Dumitriu, along with a group of pediatric researchers, found that mothers don’t pass the COVID-19 virus to their fetus, but this week’s new research indicates instead that the womb of a mother experiencing the pandemic was associated with slightly lower scores in areas like motor and social skills. 

Though her particular study didn’t measure maternal stress during pregnancy, previous studies have shown that maternal stress in the earliest stages of pregnancy can have a bigger effect on socioemotional functioning in infants than stress later in pregnancy. 

Dumitriu’s study confirmed that fact, finding that infants whose mothers were in the first trimester of pregnancy at the height of the coronavirus pandemic had the lowest neurodevelopment scores.

Researchers in California specifically took on the task of analyzing how stress related to the pandemic impacted pregnant women, finding about 40 percent of women in the study scoring high in depressive symptoms.

However, stress may not be the only factor, with the pandemic limiting social interactions like play dates that may explain the weaker developmental scores of babies born during the pandemic. 

Dumitriu emphasized that the lower developmental scores were not huge, just small shifts in average scores between groups, but it’s nonetheless important to pay attention to.

“These small shifts warrant careful attention because at the population level, they can have a significant public health impact. We know this from other pandemics and natural disasters,” said Dumitriu.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/588410-babies-born-during-pandemic-showing-slight