ArticleScientific reports2021
Maternal stress during pregnancy alters fetal cortico-cerebellar connectivity in utero and increases child sleep problems after birth.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- Perinatal Physiological and Psychological Risk Factors and Childhood Sleep Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics : JDBP · 2022Pooled it
- Postnatal distress, neonatal cerebellar myelination and neurodevelopmental outcomes at 18 months.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prenatal Stress, Enteric Nervous System Development, and the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis: A Hypothesis-Generating Framework for Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Fibromyalgia.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Prenatal maternal psychological distress is associated with neurodevelopmental outcomes in toddlers with congenital heart disease.Pediatric research · 2026Article
- Anxiety, stress, and psychological capital among multiparous women: a cross-sectional study of second pregnancies.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2026Article
- Fetal functional connectivity prospectively associates with autistic traits in toddlerhood.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Article
- Maternal Prenatal Psychological Stress and Iron Levels in the Fetal Brain.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Evaluating the effects of volume censoring on fetal functional connectivity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The association between maternal sleep and circadian rhythms during pregnancy and infant sleep and socioemotional outcomes.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- Experiences of attending prenatal ultrasounds during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia: A cross-sectional survey.Birth (Berkeley, Calif.) · 2025Article
- Association between maternal stress and child sleep quality: a nationwide ECHO prospective cohort study.Pediatric research · 2025Article
- Can Pregnancy Experience Predict Birth Experience, Postpartum Depression and Anxiety? A Prospective Descriptive Study.Nursing open · 2024Article
- Impact of Intrauterine Insults on Fetal and Postnatal Cerebellar Development in Humans and Rodents.Cells · 2024Review
- Advances in fetal and neonatal neuroimaging and everyday exposures.Pediatric research · 2024Review
- Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Brain structural and functional outcomes in the offspring of women experiencing psychological distress during pregnancy.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Review
- Characterizing Large-Scale Human Circuit Development with In Vivo Neuroimaging.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2024Review
- Sleep quality and mental health among Chinese nurses after the COVID-19 pandemic: A moderated model.PloS one · 2024Article
- Developmental trajectories of the default mode, frontoparietal, and salience networks from the third trimester through the newborn period.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Maternal perceived stress and infant behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.Pediatric research · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Child sleep disorders are increasingly prevalent and understanding early predictors of sleep problems, starting in utero, may meaningfully guide future prevention efforts. Here, we investigated whether prenatal exposure to maternal psychological stress is associated with increased sleep problems in toddlers. We also examined whether fetal brain connectivity has direct or indirect influence on this putative association. Pregnant women underwent fetal resting-state functional connectivity MRI and completed questionnaires on stress, worry, and negative affect. At 3-year follow-up, 64 mothers reported on child sleep problems, and in the subset that have reached 5-year follow-up, actigraphy data (N = 25) has also been obtained. We observe that higher maternal prenatal stress is associated with increased toddler sleep concerns, with actigraphy sleep metrics, and with decreased fetal cerebellar-insular connectivity. Specific mediating effects were not identified for the fetal brain regions examined. The search for underlying mechanisms of the link between maternal prenatal stress and child sleep problems should be continued and extended to other brain areas.
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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.