Public Release: 6-Feb-2019
The Graduate Center, CUNY
New York, February 6, 2019 – Climate change poses an exponentially greater risk for mental health problems in children born to mothers with prenatal depression who also experience natural disaster-related stress. That is the message of a new study of infants born to New York City mothers shortly after Superstorm Sandy.
The study, appearing in today’s issue of Infant Mental Health, builds on previous findings that disaster-related prenatal stress can have negative effects on an infant’s temperament. In their new work, researchers also found that in the case of mothers who were pregnant during Superstorm Sandy and who were predisposed to depression, the effects on their babies were many times worse.
“Prenatal depression increases the risk for infants to have a difficult temperament, but when we factored in the stress of experiencing an environmental catastrophe, one plus one was not two: It was ten,” said the study’s lead author Yoko Nomura, a psychology professor with The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and Queens College. Nomura published her study while a faculty fellow at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center. “Our research found that, compared to other babies, infants born to women who were prenatally depressed and pregnant during Superstorm Sandy had higher rates of distress and lower rates of pleasure-seeking activities.”
The study considered 310 pairs of mothers and children, recruited from clinics that serve patients from around the boroughs of New York City. The researchers assessed the mothers’ depression symptoms, and mothers reported their infants’ temperament via a questionnaire six months after birth.
Infants of depressed mothers displayed greater distress and fear, less smiling and laughter, and lower soothability and cuddliness compared to infants of mothers with lower scores for depression. The infants of depressed mothers who were pregnant during Sandy displayed even worse temperament.
In a 2018 study by several of the same authors, researchers concluded that a mother’s stress impacts her child’s temperament during the early years of childhood, and they demonstrated that this was true for children born during or close to the time of Superstorm Sandy.
The researchers posited that epigenetic responses to external stressors may be the cause of the increased incidents and intensity of mental health challenges for these infants.
“The combination of environmental stressors and biology may compromise gene expression and cause an excessive amount of cortisol to be passed from the mother to the fetus, resulting in infants having poorer emotional regulation, shyness and fearfulness,” said co-author Jessica Buthmann, a Graduate Center doctoral student (Psychology) and Queens College adjunct professor.
Nomura’s team recommends monitoring and screening for at-risk mothers during future environmental events as the rising incidents of environmental disasters are likely to put more mothers and infants at risk for climate change-related mental health problems.
“The take-home point is that we should be mindful to look out for the high-risk mothers, because the long-term consequences for the mental health of their offspring could be eased with proper intervention,” Nomura said.
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About The Graduate Center of The City University of New York
The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY) is a leader in public graduate education devoted to enhancing the public good through pioneering research, serious learning, and reasoned debate. The Graduate Center offers ambitious students more than 40 doctoral and master’s programs of the highest caliber, taught by top faculty from throughout CUNY — the nation’s largest public urban university. Through its nearly 40 centers, institutes, and initiatives, including its Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), The Graduate Center influences public policy and discourse and shapes innovation. The Graduate Center’s extensive public programs make it a home for culture and conversation.
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So, what they are saying is that women who exhibit mental illness are far more likely to impress that mental illness on infants and young children. Perhaps the solution is to remove these infants and young children from the care of these women who exhibit mental illness, for those infant’s and children’s safety and for the safety of society as a whole. Placing them for adoption by non-mentally ill adults to raise is the only option left for society.
Depression can be treated, and if you look at the *scale* of the differences between the depressed mothers and non-depressed mothers, rather than just considering whether the difference is statistically significant, you’ll see that the difference *isn’t* dramatic. The children of depressed mothers, while slightly less well off (at least in the opinion of the *depressed mothers* themselves, which just might be biased low), are not remotely posing any sort of threat to society.
Having the state forcibly remove children from depressed mothers would produce *far* more negative consequences then letting depressed mothers raise their own children.
And yet these same “depressed” mothers and these “researchers” will happily support the state forcibly removing my rights for no reason at all. Shoe, meet foot. According to this study these women are harming their children so the state does need to step in for the protection of these children. These researchers are negligent for not contacting Child Protective Services to help these children, instead just using them as political pawns while spreading their lies about climate change.
Fortunately, this is New York, where infants who will be, might be, might never be depressed can be killed right up to the moment of birth. There, problem solved!
This Press release on children born to depressed mothers deserves the award for “Most stupid article of the Year” and Nomura and the team deserve the same recognition.
The year is young, but its on the list.
Good news! New York is working hard to eliminate depression in babies by eliminating babies, right up to the moment of birth.
There, problem solved.
Takeaway: parents’ climate hypochondria is dangerous to their children. E.g.,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/7344329/Baby-survives-parents-global-warming-suicide-pact.html
I’ve commented this before and this grievous incident merely begs for its repetition:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire
This story should be posted to the same site that published the article above. Sadly they probably would call this confirmation of their study and not see the truth. The poor souls at Jonestown ‘who drank the kool-aid’ never new they were deluded.
Climate change, as generated by human induced global warming, doesn’t exist. This means the mental health risk as mentioned here comes from the alarmists themselves, creating their false emergency, causing misery in society. And let’s get real – the alarm sits squarely with the likelihood of an all out world war between the superpowers, and nuclear war especially.
Sure it does, David. The beneficial effects of higher CO2 levels on the Earth’s climate are well-measured. Here are some references:
https://www.sealevel.info/greening_earth_spatial_patterns_Myneni.html
E.g., National Geographic…
https://www.sealevel.info/Owen2009_Sahara_Desert_Greening-atGeo30639457.html
EXCERPT:
We even get a little bit of welcome warming from rising CO2 levels (mostly reflected in warmer nighttime lows, at high latitudes, in winter).
One of the fathers of modern climatology, Svante Arrhenius, predicted, in his famous 1908 book, that rising CO2 levels will cause:
Which is right.
Perhaps bombing innocent civilians across the Middle East might bring them some mental health problems a little more important than the weather.
Yep, which is why it’s so great that we really hit ISIS hard.
You are right, muslims bombing women and children all across the ME has created huge mental problems which cause these women and children to continue to embrace islam.
Snowflakes shouldn’t reproduce – just too many issues.
The mothers-to-be must have had exceedingly long pregnancies to notice any climate change.
O.P. refers to “… excessive amount of cortisol … passed … to fetus.” Placenta has an enzyme (11 beta-HSD2, from gene HSD11B2) that neutralizes maternal cortisol into an inactive cortisol before passing the molecule to the fetus.
So the individual genetics becomes relevant; if alteration of the enzyme activity or level of the gene splicing then maternal cortisol can be an issue. This context modifies the supposed side effects if a depressed pregnant women has elevated cortisol.
Yet, apparently the only determined effect of anxiety/depression on infants is less muscle tone.
Meaning the neuro-biological behavior of an infant can not be anticipated by evident anxiety/depression of it’s mother during pregnancy.
By clarifying the over-simplification that cortisol stress levels are detrimental I am not negating there are some depressed women who can be impacting their fetus leading to issues in infancy. But my belief is that, the maternal modifications (in some) can more regularly be provoked by modern lifestyle (ex: late night blue & disregulated sleep/wake/eat cycles) than a single event
(ex: natural disaster).
Citing free full (2017) available on-line : “Prenatal depression and infant temperament: The moderating role of placental gene expression.”
Looking at the paper, the sample size (of mothers evaluating their own offspring) consisted of 310; the breakdown between depressed and non-depressed was sadly not given. 200 were pre-Sandy and 110 were pregnant during Sandy — 75 1st trimester, 20 2nd trimester, and 15 3rd trimester. I find this very curious timing, that most of the Sandy babies were in 1st trimester at the stage of the storm, with very few in the 3rd trimester, yet all 200 non-Sandy children were conceived before the storm. It would make more sense if the trimesters were reversed, so winding down during the storm. Since the evaluation was 6 months after birth, an unknown fraction of the non-Sandy would have had their evaluation prior to the Storm, which I imagine may possibly have had some influence on living conditions.
Taking Sandy out of the equation, and evaluating 14 different subdomain, after adjusting for cofounders they found a significant difference between depressed and not (Model 2) in nine different areas:
Distress (p=0.04)
Fear (p=0.04)
Smiling and Laughter (p=0.0004)
High pleasure seeking (p=0.03)
Low pleasure seeking (p=0.02)
Soothability (p=0.004)
Falling [recovery from distress] (p=0.006)
Cuddliness (p=.0003)
Sadness (p=0.00003)
So far so good — and the fact that the most significant involved sadness, distress, smiling & laughter, cuddliness and soothability are perfect fits for the depressed mom’s own feelings.
The next step seems like a good cross check on these conclusions, split the population into two groups and see if those things are still significant. It’s not an even split between pre-Sandy birth and pregnant during Sandy, but unless there’s some reason to think that being in utero during a natural disaster is going to be different than being a baby during a natural disaster, any of the detected effects in the larger population should also show up in this sample, right? Let’s go to the p-values for the nine areas significantfrom the full pool, listing Sandy pregnancy first and pre-Sandy second. From figure 2:
Distress (p=0.03, p=0.80)
Fear (p=0.11, p=0.20)
Smiling and Laughter (p=0.93,p=0.23)
High pleasure seeking (p=0.34,p=0.59)
Low pleasure seeking (p=0.31,p=0.44)
Soothability (p=0.99,p=0.24)
Falling [recovery from distress] (p=0.37,p=0.26)
Cuddliness (p=.81,p=0.02)
Sadness (p=0.05, p=0.09)
At this point I’ve got to wonder how Model 2 in table 3 managed sub .01 p values for 5 different attributes, when *not one* of the nine attributes managed significance in both populations. In fact, only one of the attributes (sadness, the closest complement to depression) managed to have both populations below 0.20. Now Model 2 does show lower p-values than Model 1 (unadjusted for race, age, education, etc), and figure 2 appears to be unadjusted, but at this point I’m wondering how few depressed mothers are in the sample for splitting the population to have such a dramatic effect.
However, the paper’s reaction isn’t “our sensitivity exercise shows there might be a problem” — instead it’s “by george, it must be the *storm* that did it. They produce a Model 3 that adjusts for the effects of the storm, assuming the differences in the two populations is real and storm-induced. This reduces Model 2’s nine areas at 0.05 or below to five, dramatically increasing their p values as well (only Smiling and Laughter remains below 0.01). But it does let them report a Sandy-related hook, which gets the sexy climate change angle in despite Sandy being weather, not climate change.
As I showed above, only three of the earlier nine showed p values of 0.05 or below for the depressed/non-depressed split, once broken into the Sandy splits. But with 28 different possibilities, we’d expect chance to produce another one or two spurious correlations — and we get two more, Activity and Approach. Let’s look at those:
Activity (1 to 9 scale):
4.06 (0.17 se) Sandy-normal
4.87 (0.29 se) Sandy-depressed
4.15 (0.11 se) pre-Sandy-normal
4.10 (0.21 se) pre-Sandy-depressed
So three of the four groups have overlapping means +/- standard error, and one group — almost certainly the smallest group — is substantially higher. That’s a result! It obviously means that being in the womb during Sandy causes babies to be significantly *higher* in activity, but only if the mother is depressed! I’m not qualified to comment on whether the physical explanation at the end of the paper is remotely plausible, it certainly doesn’t lack weasel words.
Here’s the other new one, Approach, whatever that is.
Approach (1 to 9 scale):
5.46 (0.17 se) Sandy-normal
6.03 (0.30 se) Sandy-depressed
5.37 (0.11 se) pre-Sandy-normal
5.16 (0.21 se) pre-Sandy-depressed
Again one outlier that doesn’t overlap with se, though not by much. Note that the depressed have less approach pre sandy and more approach post-Sandy.
So not terribly impressed. Of the 14 traits are there any traits where the two *non*depressed samples, presumably larger, don’t have overlapping means +/- standard error? Five of them fit that description, but the difference between the margins is quite small except for Cuddliness (6.01 with 0.08 for pre-Sandy, 5.63 with 0.12 for Sandy). But bear in mind that the Sandy babies are heavily concentrated in a single trimester, so there may be *seasonal* factors involved instead of just Sandy-ness.
‘mental health problems in children born to mothers with prenatal depression’
The world MUST BE RESTRUCTURED for the benefit of children born to mothers with prenatal depression.
“The study considered 310 pairs of mothers and children, recruited from clinics that serve patients from around the boroughs of New York City.”
and this is a serious scientific objective double blind study.
with 310 pairs of mothers and children from around the boroughs of New York City.
What yellow press publishes that.
Back in the day when I was an engineer there were three terms that I could not stand. They were: quantum leap, paradigm shift, and exponential anything. If I heard any of those phrases during a meeting or presentation, my eyes would glaze over and I would catch up on some much needed sleep.
The surprising side of the article is that the “ it takes a village concept from HRC” is ignored. The influence of the families on the infants is never considered.