ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2008
Sex-specific programming of offspring emotionality after stress early in pregnancy.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 460 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
460 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 982 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prenatal Maternal Stress and Infant Gut Microbiome in Human and Animal Studies: A Comprehensive Systematic Review.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Perinatal stress and methylation of theEpigenetics · 2022Pooled it
- A Meta-Analysis of the Association Between Birth Weight and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.Journal of abnormal child psychology · 2018Pooled it
- Sex-dependent associations of low birth weight and suicidal ideation in adulthood: a community-based cohort study.Scientific reports · 2020Trial
- Exploring the effect of antenatal depression treatment on children's epigenetic profiles: findings from a pilot randomized controlled trial.Clinical epigenetics · 2019Trial
- Prenatal stress reprograms placental signaling and opposes maternal immune activation effects in the fetal brain.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Review
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Diminished Maternal Tryptophan Leads to Sexually Dimorphic Differences in the Placenta-Brain Axis.Nutrients · 2026Article
- Prenatal metabolic adversity reprograms insulin-responsive transcription in the developing nucleus accumbens.Molecular metabolism · 2026Article
- Glucocorticoid Receptor Signaling: Multilevel Organization, Roles in Fetal Development, and Postnatal Outcomes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Comparative Analysis of Prenatal Stress Models: Placental and Neurodevelopmental Outcomes in Mice.The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2026Article
- Maternal depression and offspring neurodevelopmental impairments in wild rodents induced by ecologically relevant prenatal stress.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prenatal stress shapes discrete responses during early recovery from repeated adult stress.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Neonatal hyperoxia exposure does not exacerbate hypertension programmed by maternal obesity.American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology · 2026Article
- Birth season shapes the infant metabolome and development in Tanzania: a secondary explorative analysis of the early life interventions for childhood growth and development in Tanzania (ELICIT) trial.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Toward Understanding and Halting Legacies of Trauma.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Paternal SARS-CoV-2 infection impacts sperm small noncoding RNAs and increases anxiety in offspring in a sex-dependent manner.Nature communications · 2025Article
400 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Prenatal stress is associated with an increased vulnerability to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. To determine the critical time window when fetal antecedents may induce a disease predisposition, we examined behavioral responses in offspring exposed to stress during early, mid, and late gestation. We found that male offspring exposed to stress early in gestation displayed maladaptive behavioral stress responsivity, anhedonia, and an increased sensitivity to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment. Long-term alterations in central corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) expression, as well as increased hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis responsivity, were present in these mice and likely contributed to an elevated stress sensitivity. Changes in CRF and GR gene methylation correlated with altered gene expression, providing important evidence of epigenetic programming during early prenatal stress. In addition, we found the core mechanism underlying male vulnerability may involve sex-specific placenta responsivity, where stress early in pregnancy significantly increased expression of PPARalpha (peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha), IGFBP-1 (insulin-like growth factor binding protein 1), HIF3alpha (hypoxia-inducible factor 3a), and GLUT4 (glucose transporter 4) in male placentas but not females. Examination of placental epigenetic machinery revealed basal sex differences, providing further evidence that sex-specific programming begins very early in pregnancy, and may contribute to the timing and vulnerability of the developing fetus to maternal perturbations. Overall, these results indicate that stress experience early in pregnancy may contribute to male neurodevelopmental disorders through impacts on placental function and fetal development.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.