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Maternal positive mental health during pregnancy impacts the hippocampus and functional brain networks in children

Nature Mental Health volume 2, pages 320–327 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Positive mental health is an essential component of overall health and well-being. However, research in this area has been relatively neglected. This study used a longitudinal dataset to investigate the impact of maternal positive emotions during pregnancy on brain structure and function in 7.5-year-old children (n = 381). A positive maternal mental health measure, including positive affect and emotional well-being during pregnancy, was developed through confirmatory factor analysis of questionnaires administered at 26–28 weeks. The study found that girls born to mothers who reported greater positive mental health during pregnancy showed larger bilateral hippocampi. Furthermore, children of mothers with greater positive mental health exhibited altered functional connectivity of several networks, including default mode, salience, executive control, amygdala and thalamo-hippocampal networks. These findings extend the study of maternal mental health beyond maternal psychopathology, suggesting the importance of promoting positive maternal mental health during pregnancy as a potential protective factor for offspring brain development.

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Fig. 1: Heatmap among maternal mood during pregnancy, socio-environmental risks during pregnancy and postnatal maternal parenting stress.
Fig. 2: Effects of maternal positive emotion on brain morphology.
Fig. 3: Functional connectivity in relation to maternal positive emotion.

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Data availability

The datasets used in the current study are available. However, external investigators who plan to use data from the GUSTO study should fill out a request form (https://fas.sicsapps.com/site/login) and describe the study proposal.

Code availability

All results were obtained via the fitlm function in MATLAB and SurfStat available at https://www.math.mcgill.ca/keith/surfstat/.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by STI 2030—Major Projects (No. 2022ZD0209000) (A.Q.) and the Singapore National Research Foundation under its Translational and Clinical Research (TCR) Flagship Programme and administered by the Singapore Ministry of Health’s National Medical Research Council (NMRC), Singapore- NMRC/TCR/004-NUS/2008 (A.Q., Y.-S.C.), NMRC/TCR/012-NUHS/2014 (A.Q., Y.-S.C.). Additional funding is provided by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, under its Prenatal/Early Childhood Grant (grant H22P0M0007) (A.Q.), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (359912, 365309 and 231614) (A.W.) and the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ; grant 22418) (A.W.).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Technology and Informatics, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Anqi Qiu & Chenye Shen

  2. NUS (Suzhou) Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Jiangsu, China

    Anqi Qiu

  3. The N.1 Institute for Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Anqi Qiu

  4. Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Anqi Qiu

  5. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Anqi Qiu

  6. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, Erasmus MC University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Mónica López-Vicente & Tonya White

  7. The Generation R Study Group, Erasmus MC University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Mónica López-Vicente

  8. Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Eszter Szekely & Ashley Wazana

  9. Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Eszter Szekely & Ashley Wazana

  10. Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Yap-Seng Chong

  11. Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Erasmus MC University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Tonya White

  12. Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Tonya White

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Contributions

The study was conceived by A.Q. All authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. A.Q. and C.S. contributed to brain image analysis and statistical analysis. M.L.-V. and E.S. contributed to CFA. A.Q. and Y.-S.C. contributed to the fund acquisition for the GUSTO data collection. A.Q., T.W. and A.W. contributed to the initial manuscript writing and revision and interpretation of data.

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Correspondence to Anqi Qiu.

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Nature Mental Health thanks Saara Nolvi, Androniki Raftogianni and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Tables 1–8 and Discussion.

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Qiu, A., Shen, C., López-Vicente, M. et al. Maternal positive mental health during pregnancy impacts the hippocampus and functional brain networks in children. Nat. Mental Health 2, 320–327 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00202-8

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