Cohort profile: the U-BIRTH study on peripartum depression and child development in Sweden.

PURPOSE: The current U-BIRTH cohort (Uppsala Birth Cohort) extends our previous cohort Biology, Affect, Stress, Imaging and Cognition (BASIC), assessing the development of children up to 11 years after birth. The U-BIRTH study aims to (1) assess the impact of exposure to peripartum mental illness on the children's development taking into account biological and environmental factors during intrauterine life and childhood; (2) identify early predictors of child neurodevelopmental and psychological problems using biophysiological, psychosocial and environmental variables available during pregnancy and early post partum. PARTICIPANTS: All mothers participating in the previous BASIC cohort are invited, and mother-child dyads recruited in the U-BIRTH study are consecutively invited to questionnaire assessments and biological sampling when the child is 18 months, 6 years and 11 years old. Data collection at 18 months (n=2882) has been completed. Consent for participation has been obtained from 1946 families of children having reached age 6 and from 698 families of children having reached age 11 years. FINDINGS TO DATE: Based on the complete data from pregnancy to 18 months post partum, peripartum mental health was significantly associated with the development of attentional control and gaze-following behaviours, which are critical to cognitive and social learning later in life. Moreover, infants of depressed mothers had an elevated risk of difficult temperament and behavioural problems compared with infants of non-depressed mothers. Analyses of biological samples showed that peripartum depression and anxiety were related to DNA methylation differences in infants. However, there were no methylation differences in relation to infants' behavioural problems at 18 months of age. FUTURE PLANS: Given that the data collection at 18 months is complete, analyses are now being undertaken. Currently, assessments for children reaching 6 and 11 years are ongoing.

Attentional control is a stable construct in infancy but not steadily linked with self-regulatory functions in toddlerhood.

Attentional control in infancy has been postulated as foundational for self-regulation later in life. However, the empirical evidence supporting this claim is inconsistent. In the current study, we examined the longitudinal data from a sample of Swedish infants (6, 10, and 18 months, n = 118, 59 boys) across a broad set of eye-tracking tasks to find stable markers of attention. Two attention indices showed a high degree of stability and internal consistency but were not related to self-regulatory functions measures at 18 or 30 months. Our findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that a relation between attentional control and self-regulation is unsupported. We discuss the need for a revision of the idea of attention as foundational for self-regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Maternal childhood trauma and perinatal distress are related to infants' focused attention from 6 to 18 months.

Maternal distress is repeatedly reported to have negative impacts on the cognitive development in children and is linked to neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder). However, studies examining the associations between maternal distress and the development of attention in infancy are few. This study investigated the longitudinal relationships between maternal distress (depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and exposure to childhood trauma) and the development of focused attention in infancy in 118 mother-infant dyads. We found that maternal exposure to non-interpersonal traumatic events in childhood was associated with the less focused attention of the infants to audio-visual stimuli at 6, 10, and 18 months. In addition, exposure to interpersonal traumatic events in childhood was identified as a moderator of the negative effect of maternal anxiety during the 2nd trimester on the development of focused attention in infants. We discuss the possible mechanisms accounting for these cross-generational effects. Our findings underscore the importance of maternal mental health to the development of focused attention in infancy and address the need for early screening of maternal mental health during pregnancy.