Enhancing Prenatal Care: Leveraging Neuroscience for 2Gen Impact

Catherine Monk, PhD, is the Diana Vagelos Professor of Women’s Mental Health and Chief, Division of Women’s Mental Health, in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology (Ob/Gyn) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Monk directs Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, an integrated clinical service within Ob/Gyn. She and collaborators recently launched the research-to-practice Center for the Transition to Parenthood http://vagelos.columbia.edu/transitiontoparenthood to enhance the perinatal ecosystem for 2Gen impact. Dr. Monk’s DOHaD and perinatal intervention research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2000, as well as by numerous foundations included the Bezos Family Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation and the March of Dimes.

Enhancing Prenatal Care: Leveraging Neuroscience for 2Gen Impact The contexts in which people live — including socio-economic status, the built environment, exposure to climate change and minoritized treatment, and levels of social support — get ‘under the skin’ to affect long-term physical and mental health trajectories. For pregnant individuals, these experiences also are transmitted to the next generation, as has been rigorously demonstrated by decades of Developmental Origins of Adult Health and Disease (DOHaD) research. Applied to child mental health outcomes, there is a third pathway for the familial inheritance of risk for psychiatric illness beyond shared genes and the quality of parental care: the impact of pregnant women’s distress on fetal and infant brain–behavior development. This presentation will review epidemiological and observational clinical data demonstrating that maternal distress is associated with children’s increased risk for psychopathology, particularly anxiety disorders. Several biological systems hypothesized to be mechanisms by which maternal distress affects fetal and child brain and behavior development also will be covered, as well as the two-generation clinical implications of DOHaD studies that focus on maternal distress. Development and parenting begin before birth.