Experiences of discrimination and acculturation are known to have a detrimental effect on a person’s health. For pregnant women, these painful experiences can also affect their children’s brain circuits, according to a new study from Yale and Columbia University. According to the researchers, these effects are distinct from those caused by general stress and depression.
The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
Previous research has shown that not only are high levels of stress and depression harmful to the person experiencing them, but they can also have long-term effects on their children if experienced during pregnancy. In recent years, studies have also found that discrimination and acculturation – or changes that occur due to migration and subsequent balancing between multiple and different cultures – can affect the adult brain. What is less clear is how children may be affected by their parents’ experiences of discrimination and acculturation.
For the new study, researchers assessed the degree of discrimination, acculturation and distress experienced by 165 pregnant people using established questionnaires. Participants were ages 14 to 19, mostly Hispanic (88%), and lived in or near the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The researchers then performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess the brain connectivity of 38 of the participants’ infants after birth.
The first step, the researchers said, was to determine whether discrimination and acculturation are distinct from other types of stress or depression.
“We thought some of these experiences might go hand in hand or overlap, in which case it would be difficult to measure the effects of discrimination or acculturation alone,” said Dustin Scheinost, associate professor of radiology and imaging. biomedical at Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
Scheinost and colleagues at Columbia and Children’s Hospitals in Los Angeles used a data analysis program that assessed all of their separate questionnaire measures of acculturation, discrimination, stress, depression, trauma, childhood and socioeconomic status, and organized them into groups based on similarity of results. The data analysis program determined that they were. According to the researchers, this helped them understand the extent to which different measures could be used to evaluate similar experiences.
“This analysis grouped measures of stress and depression and separated measures of discrimination and acculturation as separate variables,” Scheinost said. “This showed us that although these experiences of discrimination are linked to stress and depression, they are distinct enough that we can examine their unique effects.”
When the research team analyzed MRI images of the infants’ brains, they found differences in children whose parents reported experiencing discrimination during pregnancy.
The amygdala is an area of the brain associated with emotion processing and is very vulnerable to prenatal stress, the researchers said. Previous research has shown that early experiences of adversity can have measurable impacts on amygdala connectivity in infants, children, adolescents, and adults. Growing evidence also suggests that the amygdala is involved in ethnic and racial processing, such as differentiating the faces of people of different races or ethnicities.
When researchers assessed connectivity between the amygdala and another region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with higher-order functioning, they found that children of people who experienced more discrimination during pregnancy had more connectivity. weak between the two regions of the brain.
“Our finding is consistent with what we would expect to see in the brains of people affected by early life difficulties, whether before or after birth,” Scheinost said.
According to Scheinost, the takeaway is that although discrimination and acculturation affect the brain in the same way as other types of stress, there is something unique and important about these particular experiences which should be better understood. Future research, he said, should focus on whether other populations are similarly affected and what underlies those effects.
“We don’t know exactly why this is happening,” Scheinost said. “We therefore need to study the biological mechanisms that transmit these experiences of adversity from parent to offspring.”
More information:
Marisa N. Spann et al, The effects of experiencing discrimination and acculturation during pregnancy on the developing brains of offspring, Neuropsychopharmacology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41386-023-01765-3
Provided by Yale University
Quote: Discrimination during pregnancy can affect infant brain circuits (November 27, 2023) retrieved November 28, 2023 from
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