Journal of Psychiatry

The third semester human fetus may be protected from prenatal stress and programmed adult mental illness

4^th Euro-Global Congress on Psychiatrists & Forensic Psychology

November 10-11, 2016 Alicante, Spain

George T Taylor, Jacob Huffman and Francesca Manzella

University of Missouri, USA
Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Washington University Medical School, USA

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

There is evidence, primarily from animal models, that prenatal stress has long-term effects on the animal as an adult. Most of the literature is on fetal exposure to physiological stressors from drugs, endotoxins and infectious agents leading to aberrant adult behaviors. However, maternal restraint, loud noise and other psychosocial stressors have been shown to induce depression-like, anxiety-like and other atypical behavioral phenotypes in the offspring as an adult animal. Translation to humans is supported by retrospective and prospective studies revealing increased risk of psychopathology in children of women exposed to war, bereavement or other cognitively perceived stressors during their pregnancies, especially during the first and second trimesters. The presumed mechanism is excess levels of corticosteroids released from stressed mothers into fetal circulation that bind the glucocorticoid receptor and induce neural changes underlying psychiatric diseases. Collectively, the data have suggested a fetal programming disease model that perinatal insults, including maternal stress, can predispose the individual to develop adult pathology, including mental illness. We propose that the animal findings of prenatal, psychosocial stress are best applied to the first and second trimester human fetus. The third trimester human fetus is unique and has evolved unique features that may largely protect the fetus from excess corticosteroid and from later psychopathology.

Biography :

Email: geot@umsl.edu