ArticleBrain, behavior, and immunity2017
Mothers' childhood hardship forecasts adverse pregnancy outcomes: Role of inflammatory, lifestyle, and psychosocial pathways.
Article in Brain, behavior, and immunity, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 3 of them syntheses 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
41 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Parental Preconception Adversity and Offspring Health in African Americans: A Systematic Review of Intergenerational Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2023Pooled it
- The Link Between Positive and Negative Parenting Behaviors and Child Inflammation: A Systematic Review.Child psychiatry and human development · 2023Pooled it
- Inflammatory markers in serum and placenta in a randomized controlled trial of group prenatal care.American journal of obstetrics & gynecology MFM · 2023Trial
- Exploring Social and Demographic Factors as Determinants of Intestinal Inflammation in Very Low Birth-Weight Infants.Advances in neonatal care : official journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses · 2021Trial
- Characteristics, Epigenetics, and Management of Non-Infectious Preterm Birth-Sterile Intrauterine Inflammation and Idiopathic Preterm Birth.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Maternal adversity and peripheral proinflammatory cytokine concentrations in pregnancy.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- Pathways from prenatal anxiety to postpartum bonding difficulties in Pakistan: A prospective longitudinal study of psychosocial mediators and the buffering role of social support.Global mental health (Cambridge, England) · 2026Article
- Determinants of newborn birth size in Somaliland: an ordinal logistic regression analysis.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2025Article
- Coordination of inflammatory and adrenocortical stress response during pregnancy and variation by mental health.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2025Article
- Associations of multiple dimensions of socioeconomic status with adverse pregnancy outcomes.Pregnancy (Hoboken, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Sex-selective abortion bans and the birth outcomes of Asian immigrants.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- A Brief Historic Review of Research on Early Life Stress and Inflammation across the Lifespan.Neuroimmunomodulation · 2025Review
- Estimating the associations between women's maltreatment in childhood and inflammatory biomarker levels prior to and during pregnancy.PloS one · 2025Article
- Early Life Adversity, Microbiome, and Inflammatory Responses.Biomolecules · 2024Review
- Prenatal exposure to maternal disadvantage-related inflammatory biomarkers: associations with neonatal white matter microstructure.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Impact of sex, race, and social determinants of health on neonatal outcomes.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2024Review
- Modeling the Likelihood of Low Birth Weight: Findings from a Chicago-Area Health System.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2023Article
- Maternal exposure to childhood maltreatment and adverse birth outcomes.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Enduring impact of childhood adversity: Affective modulation of acoustic startle response during pregnancy and postpartum.Physiology & behavior · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Research suggests the health consequences of economic hardship can be transmitted across generations. Some of these disparities are thought to be passed to offspring during gestation. But this hypothesis has not been tested in contemporary American samples, and the mechanisms of transmission have not been characterized. Accordingly, this study had two goals: first, to determine if women exposed to economic hardship during childhood showed higher rates of adverse birth outcomes; and second, to evaluate the contribution of inflammation, psychosocial, lifestyle, and obstetric characteristics to this phenomenon. This prospective study enrolled 744 women with singleton pregnancies (59.1% White; 16.3% Black; 18.7% Latina; 5.9% Other). Childhood economic hardship was measured by self-report. Birth outcomes included length of gestation and incidence of preterm birth; birth weight percentile and small for gestational age; length of hospital stay and admission to Special Care Nursery. Analyses revealed that mothers' childhood economic hardship was independently associated with multiple adverse birth outcomes, even following adjustment for demographics, maternal education, and obstetrical confounders. Women raised in economically disadvantaged conditions had shorter gestation length and higher preterm delivery rates. Their babies had lower birth weights, were more likely to be small for gestational age, stayed in the hospital longer, and had more Special Care Nursery admissions. Mediation analyses suggested these associations arose through multiple pathways, and highlighted roles for inflammation, education, adiposity, and obstetric complications. Collectively, these findings suggest that childhood economic hardship predisposes women to adverse birth outcomes, and highlights likely behavioral and biological mechanisms.
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.