I went to a presentation today by Chris Coe and he talked about prenatal stress and postnatal outcomes. The presentation covered a wide variety of topics ranging from psychological to immunological, so he was not able to go into much detail about any one topic. I do want to share with everyone the part about the immunology of the infant in a stressed mother.
Chris performed an experiment on pregnant monkeys. Once a day in the afternoon a loud noise would go off three times. He had three groups of monkeys: a control, ones stressed in early pregnancy, and ones stresses in late pregnancy. He said the stress was no more stressful than an average day for humans, and it would not alter the weight or the length of the pregnancy.
The results showed that stress anytime during a pregnancy can alter the immune response and overall health of the baby. When stressed the body naturally pulls iron out of the blood, and takes it to the muscles and organs. Stress deprives the baby of the necessary iron in the blood and can be born with an iron deficiency that can lead to anemia. Babies that are born with an iron deficiency do not receive enough iron from the mother after birth so they usually become anemic at about 6 months. The anemia affected the production of NK cells. The baby was born with a reduced number of NK cells and due to the anemia late in infancy the NK levels were reduced even more. This affected the infants response to pathogens.
This experiment also showed that cytokine levels were reduced in the infant. This shows that the adaptive response is altered. There was an increase in the TH-2 cells indicating that prenatal stress can lead to an increase in allergies and asthma in the child or adult. This was also demonstrated in another study were adults were asked about how their pregnancy went, if the mom was stressed or if they had a short gestation, normal, or long gestation and how that related to the health of the adult. In an interesting twist the adults that had a longer than average gestation usually had allergies or asthma as well as the adults with a short gestation.
This led me to wonder of the increase in asthma and allergies in children and adults is a result of the working culture we are in? Would we see a decrease in the number of children with allergies and asthma if the pregnant mother did not perform stressful activities?
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2 comments:
I think this is very interesting. Did they mention anything about milk production in the mothers that were stressed vs. nonstressed? It would be interesting to re-evaluate the infants immune response after breast feeding.
I definetely think there is a link between stress and the immune response not only in pregnancy, but also in infertility. Alice Domar's research out of Boston is fascinating in regards to decreasing stress and increasing fertility rates. I think there is probably a link between reducing stress and increasing immune function thereby increasing fertility.
Interesting work and good questions to ask. I've also read an article suggesting that the increase incidences of ashtma and allergies is associated with air qaulity and secondhand smoking.
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