ArticleTranslational psychiatry2016
Prenatal immune programming of the sex-dependent risk for major depression.
Article in Translational psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 78 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fetal programming of neuropsychiatric disorders by maternal pregnancy depression: a systematic mini review.Pediatric research · 2019Pooled it
- Infant hippocampal and amygdala volume in an observational follow-up from a randomized clinical trial for maternal prenatal depression.Nature communications · 2026Trial
- Socioeconomic disadvantage, gestational immune activity, and neurodevelopment in early childhood.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Trial
- Prenatal stress alters offspring neurovascular, autonomic, and immune development in animal models of neuropsychiatric and cardiometabolic disorders.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Review
- Exploring offspring behaviour after prenatal COVID-19 vaccination in mice.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Impacts of prenatal resiquimod exposure during late gestation on rat offspring development and behavior.American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology · 2026Article
- Elevated Serum IL-6/IL-10 Ratio as a Promising Diagnostic and Disease Grading Biomarker for Cerebral Small Vessel Disease.Journal of inflammation research · 2026Article
- Prenatal immune origins of brain aging differ by sex.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Disruption of tryptophan metabolism by high-fat diet-triggered maternal immune activation promotes social behavioral deficits in male mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Understanding the potential impact of trimester-specific maternal immune activation due to SARS-CoV-2 on early human neurodevelopment and the role of cytokine balance.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2025Article
- Maternal Prepregnancy Obesity and Offspring Intelligence Quotient at 5 Years: A Multicohort Analysis.Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology · 2025Article
- Maternal immune activation by toll-like receptor 7 agonist during mid-gestation increases susceptibility to blood-brain barrier leakage after puberty.Brain behavior and immunity integrative · 2024Article
- The interaction of second trimester prenatal maternal inflammation and psychosocial stress on offspring depressive symptoms in adolescence.Brain behavior and immunity integrative · 2024Article
- Cord serum cytokines at birth and children's trajectories of mood dysregulation symptoms from 3 to 8 years: The EDEN birth cohort.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2024Article
- Prenatal maternal Inflammation, childhood cognition and adolescent depressive symptoms.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2024Article
- The role of the placenta-brain axis in psychoneuroimmune programming.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2024Article
- Association between gut microbiota and its functional metabolites with prenatal depression in women.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- An epidemiological study of season of birth, mental health, and neuroimaging in the UK Biobank.PloS one · 2024Article
- Associations between prenatal maternal stress, maternal inflammation during pregnancy, and children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms throughout childhood.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2023Article
- Interaction of the pre- and postnatal environment in the maternal immune activation model.Discover mental health · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Maternal immune functioning during pregnancy contributes to sex-dependent deficits in neurodevelopment and to behaviors associated with affective traits in preclinical studies, and has been indirectly associated with offspring depression in epidemiologic studies. We therefore investigated the association between immune activity during pregnancy and the risk of depression among male and female offspring. We conducted a case-control study of depression (n=484 cases and n=774 controls) using data from the New England Family Study, a pregnancy cohort enrolled between 1959 and 1966 that assessed psychiatric outcomes in adult offspring (mean age=39.7 years). We assayed concentrations of three pro-inflammatory cytokines, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, and the anti-inflammatory cytokine, IL-10, in maternal serum collected at the end of the second and beginning of the third trimesters. High maternal TNF-α was associated with reduced odds of depression among both male and female offspring (odds ratio (OR)=0.68; confidence interval (CI)=0.48, 0.98). However, when considering the TNF-α to IL-10 ratio, a measure of the ratio of pro- to anti-inflammatory loading, maternal immune effects on offspring depression differed significantly by sex (χ(2)=13.9, degrees of freedom=4, P=0.008). Among females, higher maternal TNF-α:IL-10 was associated with reduced odds of depression (OR=0.51; CI=0.32, 0.81), whereas, among males, high maternal TNF-α:IL-10 was associated with elevated odds of depression (OR=1.86; CI=1.02, 3.39). Thus, the balance between TNF-α and IL-10 in maternal prenatal serum was associated with depression in a sex-dependent manner. These findings are consistent with the role of TNF-α in the maturation of the sexually dimorphic fetal brain circuitry that regulates stress and affective responses, and support a prenatal stress-immune model of depression pathogenesis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.