Stress during pregnancy and the cerebellum

Many of these observations come from the following paper: van den Heuvel et al. 2021

• Maternal psych stress/negative affect during pregnancy was associated with variation in fetal cortico-cerebellar connectivity.
• Disturbed sleep in early childhood poses serious consequences for child outcomes and play an important role in health disparities (especially among minorities; Laposky et al. 2016); sleep is important for emotion processing (Anderson et al. 2016)
• Earliest predictors of child sleep disturbance can potentially be found in utero. Small number of studies have reported sleep problems in children prenatally exposed to maternal mood disturbance (O’Conner et al. 2007; Toffol et al. 2019)
• Novel gap explored by current study:
• Despite growing evidence of a relationship between the prenatal environment, no study to date has explored neural mechanisms by which maternal stress may affect child sleep patterns before birth
• Aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between maternal stress and negative affect during pregnancy, fetal cortico-cerebellar connectivity and toddler’s sleep problems in a predominately African-American, high-risk sample from Detroit.
• Why cerebellum?
  • Increased in this brain region by developmental neuroscientists (Fair et al. 2018)
  • Cerebellum grows exceptionally fast in the third trimester of pregnancy and its extremely sensitive to prenatal influences at the end of gestation (Matthews et al. 2018; Herzmann et al. 2018; Tiemeier et al. 2010; Volpe, 2009) and early adversity (Bauer et al. 2009)
  • Cerebellum is also implicated in sleep disorders (Canto et al. 2017)
• What this study found:
  • Ivestigation of the fetal brain network identified three highly connected areas, “hubs” in the cerebellum emphasizing the importance of this region for fetal functional connectivity.
  • High maternal negative affect and stress during pregnancy was associated with increased sleep problems in toddlerhood.
  • Significant sex interaction indicating that the association was largely driven by males. Additionally prenatal exposure to maternal negative affect and stress was associated with decreased cerebellar-insula FC in the fetus.