September 14, 2016.
According to a French study presented Monday, September 12 in Paris, on the occasion of the annual congress of the European Society of Pediatric Endocrinology, the stress undergone by the mother during pregnancy has direct consequences on the life expectancy of the child. .
The stress of the pregnant woman reflects on the child
Nicolas Todd, researcher at the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital (Inserm) and his team shed light on a phenomenon that is at the very least interesting in prenatal life. According to their work, French children born between 1914 and 1916 whose fathers were killed or seriously injured during the war saw their life expectancy shortened, compared to other children.
Children declared wards of the nation lived on average 1.1 years less than those who did not lose parents in the war. As for those who had lost their father before being born, their lifespan was reduced by 2.2 years. ” These results strongly suggest that in humans, maternal psychological stress is transmitted to the fetus “, Thus estimated the authors of the study.
Losing your father before you are born is not without consequences
To reach these conclusions, the researchers identified more than 5,600 children born between August 1914 and December 1916 who received the quality of ” ward of the nation “. They cross-referenced the data concerning them with the database which lists the 1.4 million French soldiers who died between 1914 and 1919. To be as close as possible to the truth, they also took into account the children’s background.
” The next step would be to determine the cause of death of those who were orphaned before being born, to inform the mechanisms involved », Said Nicolas Todd. It would also be interesting to “ compare children’s school results according to whether or not their father died during pregnancy “. ” But for that we would have to find and combine the data, and here again, we depend on what the archives keep …“
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