ArticlePsychoneuroendocrinology2019
The transgenerational transmission of maternal adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Insights from placental aging and infant autonomic nervous system reactivity.
Article in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Parental Preconception Adversity and Offspring Health in African Americans: A Systematic Review of Intergenerational Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2023Pooled it
- Associations between maternal adverse childhood experiences and children's physical health conditions: A longitudinal study.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Article
- Associations between maternal adversity and health and children's telomere length.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Maternal adverse childhood experiences and perinatal outcomes: A retrospective inceptive cohort study.PloS one · 2025Article
- A Brief Historic Review of Research on Early Life Stress and Inflammation across the Lifespan.Neuroimmunomodulation · 2025Review
- The CARING study: Examining biological, behavioral, and genetic mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of toxic stress.Research in nursing & health · 2024Article
- Birthing parent adverse childhood experiences and risk of atopic diseases in 5-year-old children.Frontiers in allergy · 2024Article
- Maternal and Paternal Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Offspring Health and Wellbeing: A Scoping Review.Maternal and child health journal · 2024Article
- Relationships between early-life family poverty and relative socioeconomic status with gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy later in life.Annals of epidemiology · 2023Article
- Associations among maternal lifetime trauma, psychological symptoms in pregnancy, and infant stress reactivity and regulation.Development and psychopathology · 2023Article
- Adverse childhood experiences and lifelong health.Nature medicine · 2023Review
- Psychological and biological mechanisms linking trauma with cardiovascular disease risk.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Perinatal and early childhood biomarkers of psychosocial stress and adverse experiences.Pediatric research · 2022Review
- Unique Contributions of Maternal Prenatal and Postnatal Emotion Dysregulation on Infant Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2022Article
- Intergenerational transmission of maternal childhood adversity and depression on children's internalizing problems.Journal of affective disorders · 2022Article
- Prenatal distress links maternal early life adversity to infant stress functioning in the next generation.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2022Article
- Article
- Maternal-Child Health Outcomes from Pre- to Post-Implementation of a Trauma-Informed Care Initiative in the Prenatal Care Setting: A Retrospective Study.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Symptoms of Prenatal Depression Associated with Shorter Telomeres in Female Placenta.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveTo test alterations in placental cellular aging as one pathway by which maternal early adversity influences physiologic development in her offspring.
methodsMaternal report of her adverse childhood experiences (ACE) was obtained prenatally along with measures of prenatal stress and demographic information. Placentas (N = 67) were collected at birth and telomere length (TL) was measured in four separate fetally-derived placental tissues: amnion, chorion, villus, and umbilical cord. At four months of age, infants completed the still-face paradigm (SFP) during which respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) data were collected; RSA reactivity and RSA recovery was available from 44 and 41 infants respectively. Multi-level mixed effects models examined the impact of maternal ACE score on placental TL. Generalized linear models tested the relation between composite placental TL and infant RSA, as well as the moderation of maternal ACE score and infant RSA by composite placental TL.
resultsHigher maternal ACE score significantly predicted shorter placental TL across tissues (β = -0.015; P = 0.036) and infant RSA across the SFP. No direct relation was found between placental TL and RSA, however composite placental TL moderated the relation between ACE score and both infant RSA reactivity (β = 0.025; P = 0.005) and RSA recovery (β = -0.028; P = 0.032). In infants with shorter composite placental TL, higher ACE score predicted greater RSA suppression during the still-face epoch relative to play period 1 and greater RSA augmentation during play period 2 relative to the still-face epoch.
conclusionsThese data are the first, to our knowledge, to report that changes in placental TL influence the transgenerational impact of maternal early life adversity on the development of her offspring's autonomic nervous system.
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