ArticleHealth psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association2016
Diurnal salivary cortisol patterns prior to pregnancy predict infant birth weight.
Article in Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Short interpregnancy intervals and adverse perinatal outcomes in high-resource settings: An updated systematic review.Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology · 2019Pooled it
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- Diurnal cortisol trajectories from mid-pregnancy to one year after birth.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- Sex-selective abortion bans and the birth outcomes of Asian immigrants.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- The feasibility of a web-based resilience-building program to prevent stress among danish pregnant nulliparous women: A randomised controlled feasibility trial.PLOS mental health · 2025Article
- Developmental cascades from maternal preconception stress to child behavior problems: Testing multilevel preconception, prenatal, and postnatal influences.Developmental psychology · 2024Article
- Maternal depressive symptom trajectories from preconception through postpartum: Associations with offspring developmental outcomes in early childhood.Journal of affective disorders · 2022Article
- Associations between combined exposure to environmental hazards and social stressors at the neighborhood level and individual perinatal outcomes in the ECHO-wide cohort.Health & place · 2022Article
- SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) as a possible risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Review
- Characterizing and Evaluating Diurnal Salivary Uric Acid Across Pregnancy Among Healthy Women.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2022Article
- Effect of short inter-pregnancy interval on perinatal outcomes among pregnant women in North-west Ethiopia: A prospective cohort study.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- Maternal Stress Before Conception Is Associated with Shorter Gestation.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2021Article
- Article
- Prenatal stress increases IgA coating of offspring microbiota and exacerbates necrotizing enterocolitis-like injury in a sex-dependent manner.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2020Article
- Prenatal Maternal Cortisol Levels and Infant Birth Weight in a Predominately Low-Income Hispanic Cohort.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- New directions in necrotizing enterocolitis with early-stage investigators.Pediatric research · 2020Review
- Prenatal maternal stress and child hair cortisol four years later: Evidence from a low-income sample.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2020Article
- The Effect of Prenatal Stress, Proxied by Marital and Paternity Status, on the Risk of Preterm Birth.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2019Article
- Sudden infant death and social justice: A syndemics approach.Maternal & child nutrition · 2019Article
- Biomarkers for Macrosomia Prediction in Pregnancies Affected by Diabetes.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveElevated maternal psychosocial stress during pregnancy and accompanying changes in stress hormones may contribute to risk of adverse birth outcomes such as low birth weight and preterm birth. Relatedly, research on fetal programming demonstrates intriguing associations between maternal stress processes during pregnancy and outcomes in offspring that extend into adulthood. The purpose of this study was to test whether hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) patterns in mothers during the period between 2 pregnancies (i.e., the interpregnancy interval) and during the subsequent pregnancy predict infant birth weight, a key birth outcome.
methodThis study sampled salivary cortisol before and during pregnancy in a diverse community sample of 142 women enrolled in the Community Child Health Network study.
resultsUsing multilevel modeling, we found that flatter diurnal cortisol slopes in mothers during the interval between one birth and a subsequent pregnancy predicted lower infant birth weight of the subsequent child. This interpregnancy cortisol pattern in mothers also correlated with significantly shorter interpregnancy intervals, such that women with flatter cortisol slopes had more closely spaced pregnancies. After adding demographic covariates of household income, cohabitation with partner, and maternal race to the model, these results were unchanged. For participants who provided both interpregnancy and pregnancy cortisol data (n = 73), we found that interpregnancy cortisol slopes predicted infant birth weight independent of pregnancy cortisol slopes.
conclusionsThese novel findings on interpregnancy HPA axis function and subsequent pregnancy outcomes strongly support life course health approaches and underscore the importance of maternal stress physiology between pregnancies. (PsycINFO Database Record
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