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Sex-Specific Impacts of Prenatal Stress

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Prenatal Stress and Child Development

Abstract

Extensive evidence suggests that maternal stress during pregnancy has profound impacts on maternal, placental, and fetal physiology, resulting in long-lasting effects on children’s health and development. With increased recent attention to sex as a biological variable in research, more studies have begun to assess whether impacts of prenatal stress on children’s development may differ by sex. That male fetuses are more vulnerable to in utero physiological stressors is supported by a large body of clinical data as well as evolutionary theory on sex-specific life history strategies (e.g., Trivers-Willard hypothesis). However, sex differences in the long-lasting postnatal impacts of in utero stressors – and in particular psychosocial stressors – are less straightforward. The strongest epidemiological evidence of sex-specific impacts of prenatal psychosocial stress comes from neurodevelopmental and brain imaging studies which overwhelmingly suggest greater female vulnerability. Overall, female fetuses display greater responsiveness to in utero maternal cues compared to males, and the heightened risks of affective symptoms among girls following prenatal stress may reflect a “mismatch” between prenatal and postnatal environments. By contrast, males appear to be more vulnerable to asthma and wheeze following prenatal psychosocial stress. For other outcomes including perinatal endpoints and growth, evidence is equivocal. Several mechanisms to account for sex-specific response to prenatal psychosocial stress are proposed including hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal pathways, placental changes, and epigenetic modifications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Rutgers School of Public Health, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Emily S. Barrett

  2. Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute; EOHSI, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Emily S. Barrett

  3. Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Jeremy Lessing

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  1. Emily S. Barrett
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  2. Jeremy Lessing
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Correspondence to Emily S. Barrett .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Ashley Wazana  & Eszter Székely  & 

  2. Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Ashley Wazana  & Eszter Székely  & 

  3. BC Children‘s Hospital, BC Women‘s Hospital and Health Centre, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Tim F. Oberlander

  4. Department of Pediatrics Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Tim F. Oberlander

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Barrett, E.S., Lessing, J. (2021). Sex-Specific Impacts of Prenatal Stress. In: Wazana, A., Székely, E., Oberlander, T.F. (eds) Prenatal Stress and Child Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60159-1_10

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