Does Covid-19 harm the child during pregnancy? – spectrum of scienceGo directly to the content
Corona infection and children: Does Covid-19 harm the baby during pregnancy?
It was previously unclear whether coronavirus disease during pregnancy affects early childhood development. A research team followed affected families for two years after the birth – and initially gave the all-clear.
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Pregnant women suffering from Covid-19 often worry about their child. However, new data allows us to breathe a sigh of relief.
Small children whose unvaccinated mothers were infected with Sars-CoV-2 during pregnancy do not lag behind in their motor, cognitive or emotional development. This has been revealed by a study that has now been publishedin which a Canadian working group extensively surveyed around 900 mothers several times in the first two years after giving birth.
During the corona pandemic, pregnant women were very afraid of contracting Covid-19. Unvaccinated pregnant women had a higher risk of a more severe course of the disease and were comparatively more likely to have a premature birth, usually in the last three months of pregnancy.
However, the newborns generally did well – the virus is only very rarely transmitted from mother to fetus. It initially remained to be seen whether the maternal corona infection could have a negative impact on the intellectual and motor development of infants and toddlers, similar to the flu.
Gerald Giesbrecht’s team from Canada’s University of Calgary analyzed complete data from 896 children whose unvaccinated mothers gave birth between April 2020 and July 2022. Around 100 of the women were proven to have been infected with Sars-CoV-2 during pregnancy, and almost all of them experienced clear symptoms. The other mothers most likely had not had any contact with the virus; in any case, no antibodies against it were detectable in their blood.
After 6, 12, and 24 months, all mothers completed established questionnaires that assessed their babies’ and toddlers’ emotional behavior, communication skills, gross and fine motor skills, problem-solving behavior, and social development. This allowed the team to track when the children reached certain developmental milestones.
No corona aftermath
According to the results, the babies of infected mothers developed no differently than their peers in the control group, with one tiny difference: the former unexpectedly achieved slightly better values in “regulatory ability” at six months, meaning they were able to calm down more easily, for example. The explanations remain speculative. The researchers describe the very limited connection between infection and early childhood development in this study as negligible.
Previous studies, which only examined early childhood development up to the age of 18 months and only once, had produced inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. This may be due to the control group chosen. The children of infected mothers performed worse than babies from before the pandemic. The authors do not attribute this to coronavirus exposure in the womb, but rather to pandemic-related parental stress. Fears and isolation could have generally had a negative impact on the development of this generation of babies.
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is a doctor of biology and editor for brain research, psychology, education and biology.
JAMA Network Open, 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.43697, 2024
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