Columbia researchers found that babies born during the pandemic’s first year scored lower on a developmental screening test of social and motor skills at 6 months, regardless of whether their mothers had Covid during pregnancy, compared to babies born just before the pandemic.
The study, which included 255 babies born at a New York-Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Allen Hospital between March and December 2020, was published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
“Infants born to mothers who have viral infections during pregnancy have a higher risk of neurodevelopmental deficits, so we thought we would find some changes in the neurodevelopment of babies whose mothers had COVID during pregnancy,” says Dani Dumitriu, assistant professor of paediatrics and psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and lead investigator of the study.
“We were surprised to find absolutely no signal suggesting that exposure to COVID while in utero was linked to neurodevelopmental deficits. Rather, being in the womb of a mother experiencing the pandemic was associated with slightly lower scores in areas such as motor and social skills, though not in others, such as communication or problem-solving skills. The results suggest that the huge amount of stress felt by pregnant mothers during these unprecedented times may have played a role.”
“These were not large differences, meaning we did not see a higher rate of actual developmental delays in our sample of a few hundred babies, just small shifts in average scores between the groups,” Dumitriu says. “But these small shifts warrant careful attention because at the population level, they can have a significant public health impact. We know this from other pandemics and natural disasters.”
Developmental trajectory of infants begins early
When the first wave of COVID hit New York City in early 2020, Dumitriu led a group of paediatric researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian in organising studies investigating the impact of the virus on infants through the COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes (COMBO) Initiative.
In one early study, the researchers discovered that mothers do not pass the COVID virus to their fetus. However, it is known that viral illnesses during pregnancy increase the risk of neurodevelopmental delays in children through activation of the mother’s immune system, which in turn affects fetal brain development.
“The developmental trajectory of an infant begins before birth,” says Dumitriu, who is a paediatrician in the Well Baby Nursery at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. “With potentially millions of infants who may have been exposed to COVID in utero, and even more mothers just living through the stress of the pandemic, there is a critical need to understand the neurodevelopmental effects of the pandemic on future generations.”
In the current study, the researchers analysed responses from a questionnaire that paediatricians give to parents to evaluate aspects of infant development, such as communication and fine and gross motor, problem-solving, and social skills.
Nearly half of the mothers in the study had COVID at some point during their pregnancies, though most of the illnesse