PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Maternal childhood trauma may lead to early metabolic changes in male children

This is the finding of a study that followed 352 pairs of newborns and their mothers in the cities of Guarulhos and São Paulo (Brazil). Changes observed in the first two months of life may increase future risk of obesity and diabetes.

2025-04-23
(Press-News.org) Adverse situations experienced by the mother during childhood – such as neglect or physical, psychological or sexual violence – can trigger excessive weight gain in male children as early as the first two months of life. This was shown in a study that followed 352 pairs of newborns and their mothers in the cities of Guarulhos and São Paulo, Brazil. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The analyses indicated the occurrence of very early metabolic alterations in babies that not only led to weight gain above that expected for their age but also have the potential to increase the future risk of developing obesity and diabetes.

This is the first article resulting from a Thematic Project supported by FAPESP and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. Using a database of 580 vulnerable pregnant women, the group is studying intergenerational trauma, i.e., negative effects that can be passed on to future generations, even if the offspring have not lived through such experiences.

Conducted by researchers from Columbia and Duke Universities, both in the United States, and the School of Medicine of the Federal University of São Paulo (EPM-UNIFESP) in Brazil, the study focuses on issues related to mother-baby interaction, development, and mental and physical health (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/32577).  

“We observed that although the babies were born weighing within the expected parameters, in the first few days of life they showed altered weight gain, far above what’s recommended as ideal by the World Health Organization [WHO],” says Andrea Parolin Jackowski, professor at UNIFESP and coordinator of the project in Brazil.

According to the WHO, the ideal weight gain in the first stage of life is up to 30 grams per day. However, the male babies in the study had an average weight gain of 35 grams per day – with some gaining up to 78 grams per day.

“The babies who took part in the study were born full-term, healthy and within the ideal weight range. All of the pregnancies we followed were low-risk, but our data showed that every adversity the mother experienced during childhood increased the babies’ weight gain by 1.8 grams per day. And this was limited to males,” the researcher reports.

According to Jackowski, there are many factors that can influence a baby’s weight in early life, and maternal childhood trauma appears to be one of them. For this reason, the analysis took care to control for so-called confounders – variables related to the mothers’ stress levels that could influence the results. Some examples include lifetime trauma experiences (the effects of which are cumulative) and current trauma, as well as education level and socioeconomic status.

“It’s also important to note that 70% of the babies who took part in the study were exclusively breastfed. The other 30% were on mixed feeding [a combination of breast milk and formula]. This means that they weren’t eating filled cookies or other foods that could actually change their weight. Therefore, the results suggest the occurrence of an early metabolic alteration in these babies,” she says.

Why only boys?

According to the researcher, maternal trauma during childhood only had an impact on the weight of male babies because of physiological variations in the placenta associated with the sex of the fetus.

The placenta is a temporary organ composed of maternal and fetal tissue that shows structural differences and differences in the regulation and expression of steroids and proteins depending on the sex of the baby. “Male fetuses develop strategies to maintain constant growth in the face of an adverse intrauterine environment, leading to a greater risk of prematurity and fetal death,” explains the researcher.

In addition, she adds, childhood adversity is known to increase the risk of depression and anxiety during pregnancy, which can lead to increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and cortisol in the intrauterine environment. “It appears that the placenta of female fetuses adapts to protect them, slowing down the growth rate without restricting intrauterine growth [i.e., the size of the baby is within the expected range at the end of pregnancy] and allowing for a higher survival rate,” she explains.

Another important issue is that the placenta of male fetuses tends to be more susceptible to fluctuations in substances and metabolites present in the maternal bloodstream compared to female placentas. “As a result, in these cases of trauma, it can become more permeable, causing the male fetus to be more exposed to inflammatory factors resulting from high levels of stress, such as cortisol and interleukins, for example.”

The work now published is the first to identify intergenerational trauma as a trigger for physical changes at such an early age. “It’s already known that adverse events in the mother’s childhood can trigger psychological and developmental problems, but our study is pioneering in showing that they can affect physical problems, such as weight gain, as early as the first two months of life,” says Jackowski.

Now, the research team, which includes Vinicius O. Santana and FAPESP postdoctoral fellow Aline C. Ramos, will follow the weight development of the children of mothers who suffered adversity in childhood until they are 24 months old. “We’re going to follow them for longer because we want to investigate the impact of the introduction of food, which usually occurs at 6 months of age,” she says.

As the researchers explain, the research suggests that metabolic changes can be modified. “It’s not a matter of determinism. We need to monitor how the metabolism and inflammatory factors behave in these babies over a longer period of time to understand how to modulate this process. It’s important to know that all of this is modifiable, and we’re now going to look at how we can intervene,” she says.

About FAPESP

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration.

END


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Helping computers perceive and interact with the visual world

2025-04-23
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Cordelia Schmid, Research Director at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, as the 2025-2026 ACM Athena Lecturer. Schmid is recognized for outstanding contributions to computer vision in image retrieval, object recognition, and video understanding. Her work has helped computers understand, perceive, and interact with the visual world. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have ...

New precision mental health care approach for depression addresses unique patient needs

2025-04-23
Depression involves a complex interplay of psychological patterns, biological vulnerabilities and social stressors, making its causes and symptoms highly variable. Equally complex is the treatment of depression, which requires a highly individualized approach that may involve a combination of medication, psychotherapy and lifestyle changes. In a decade-long multi-institutional study, U of A psychologists teamed up with Radboud University in the Netherlands to develop a precision treatment approach for depression that gives patients individualized recommendations based on multiple characteristics, ...

Metabolic syndrome linked to increased risk of young-onset dementia

2025-04-23
MINNEAPOLIS — Having a larger waistline, high blood pressure and other risk factors that make up metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of young-onset dementia, according to a study published on April 23, 2025, online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Young-onset dementia is diagnosed before the age of 65. The study does not prove that metabolic syndrome causes young-onset dementia, it only shows an association. Metabolic syndrome is defined as having excess belly fat plus two or more of the following risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, higher than normal ...

Hotter temps trigger wetlands to emit more methane as microbes struggle to keep up

2025-04-23
Rising temperatures could tip the scale in an underground battle that has raged for millennia. In the soils of Earth’s wetlands, microbes are fighting to both produce and consume the powerful greenhouse gas methane. But if the Earth gets too hot, a key way wetlands clamp down on methane could be at risk, according to a Smithsonian study published April 23. Methane is responsible for roughly 19% of global warming, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. And while wetlands are champions at removing carbon dioxide (CO2)—the more abundant greenhouse gas—they are ...

ATP prevents harmful aggregation of proteins associated with Parkinson’s and ALS

2025-04-23
Neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) are debilitating conditions that affect millions of people worldwide every year. These pathologies are notoriously difficult to prevent or effectively treat due to a complex interplay of genetics, lifestyle, co-infection, and many other factors impacting everything from diagnosis to treatment. While a comprehensive cure-all to these neurological conditions is unlikely, scientists are making headway into understanding their fundamental ...

Water quality could be degraded by development and conversion of forests upstream, with sediment levels and nitrogen concentrations also worsened, per modelling analysis of the Middle Chattahoochee wa

2025-04-23
Water quality could be degraded by development and conversion of forests upstream, with sediment levels and nitrogen concentrations also worsened, per modelling analysis of the Middle Chattahoochee watershed of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. #### Article URL: https://plos.io/3Gi6Kaq Article Title: Projected land use changes will cause water quality degradation at drinking water intakes across a regional watershed Author Countries: United States Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ...

The antibiotic that takes the bite out of Lyme

2025-04-23
Current ‘gold standard’ treatment does not work for up to 20% of population and kills beneficial bacteria Scientists screened nearly 500 FDA-approved compounds to assess effectiveness against Lyme Piperacillin effectively treats Lyme disease at 100-times lower dose than doxycycline CHICAGO --- Lyme disease, a disease transmitted when deer ticks feed on infected animals like deer and rodents, and then bite humans, impacts nearly half a million individuals in the U.S. annually. Even in acute cases, Lyme can be devastating; but early treatment with antibiotics can prevent chronic symptoms like heart and neurological problems and arthritis from developing.  Scientists ...

Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome may be driven by remnants of infection

2025-04-23
Up to 20% of patients treated for Lyme experience persistent symptoms Lyme’s post-infection features share some similarities to long COVID-19 and could be due to lingering antigens Individual differences in immune response to remnants of the Lyme bacterium’s cell wall likely play an important role in patient outcome. CHICAGO --- Symptoms that persist long after Lyme disease is treated are not uncommon — a 2022 study found that 14% of patients who were diagnosed and treated early with antibiotic therapy would still develop Post Treatment Lyme Disease (PTLD). Yet doctors ...

Engineering a robot that can jump 10 feet high – without legs

2025-04-23
Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, Georgia Tech engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can leap 10 feet high even though it doesn’t have legs. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward. The researchers described the soft robot April 23 in Science Robotics. They said their findings could help develop robots capable of jumping across various terrain, at different heights, in multiple directions. “Nematodes are ...

EMBARGOED: Could this molecule be “checkmate” for coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2?

2025-04-23
A team at UC San Francisco and Gladstone Institutes has developed new drug candidates that show great promise against the virus that causes COVID-19 and potentially other coronaviruses that could cause future pandemics. In preclinical testing, the compounds performed better than Paxlovid against SARS-CoV-2 and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, which periodically causes deadly outbreaks around the world. “In three years, we’ve moved as fast as a pharmaceutical company would have, from start to finish, developing drug candidates against a totally new pathogen,” said Charles Craik, PhD, UCSF professor ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Sugar, the hidden thermostat in plants

Personality can explain why some CEOs earn higher salaries

This puzzle game shows kids how they’re smarter than AI

Study suggests remembrances of dead played role in rise of architecture in Andean region

Brain stimulation can boost math learning in people with weaker neural connections

Inhibiting enzyme could halt cell death in Parkinson’s disease, study finds

Neurotechnology reverses biological disadvantage in maths learning

UNDER EMBARGO: Neurotechnology reverses biological disadvantage in maths learning

Scientists target ‘molecular machine’ in the war against antimicrobial resistance

Extending classical CNOP method for deep-learning atmospheric and oceanic forecasting

Aston University research: Parents should encourage structure and independence around food to support children’s healthy eating

Thunderstorms are a major driver of tree death in tropical forests

Danforth Plant Science Center adds two new faculty members

Robotic eyes mimic human vision for superfast response to extreme lighting

Racial inequities and access to COVID-19 treatment

Residential segregation and lung cancer risk in African American adults

Scientists wipe out aggressive brain cancer tumors by targeting cellular ‘motors’

Capturability distinction analysis of continuous and pulsed guidance laws

CHEST expands Bridging Specialties Initiative to include NTM disease and bronchiectasis on World Bronchiectasis Day

Exposure to air pollution may cause heart damage

SwRI, UTSA selected by NASA to test electrolyzer technology aboard parabolic flight

Prebiotics might be a factor in preventing or treating issues caused by low brain GABA

Youngest in class at higher risk of mental health problems

American Heart Association announces new volunteer leaders for 2025-26

Gut microbiota analysis can help catch gestational diabetes

FAU’s Paulina DeVito awarded prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Champions for change – Paid time off initiative just made clinical trials participation easier

Fentanyl detection through packaging

Prof. Eran Meshorer elected to EMBO for pioneering work in epigenetics

New 3D glacier visualizations provide insights into a hotter Earth

[Press-News.org] Maternal childhood trauma may lead to early metabolic changes in male children
This is the finding of a study that followed 352 pairs of newborns and their mothers in the cities of Guarulhos and São Paulo (Brazil). Changes observed in the first two months of life may increase future risk of obesity and diabetes.