Prenatal stress perturbs fetal iron homeostasis in a sex-specific manner

Abstract

What is the influence of chronic maternal prenatal stress (PS) on fetal iron homeostasis? In a prospective case-control study in 164 pregnant women, we show that cord blood transferrin saturation is lower in male stressed neonates. The total effect of PS exposure on fetal ferritin revealed a decrease of 15.4% compared with controls. Electrocardiogram-based Fetal Stress Index (FSI) identified affected fetuses non-invasively during the third trimester of gestation. FSI-based timely detection of fetuses affected by PS can support early individualized iron supplementation and neurodevelopmental follow-up to prevent long-term sequelae due to PS-exacerbated impairment of the iron homeostasis.

arXiv commentFELICITy study; ClinicalTrials.gov registration number is NCT03389178

References in corpus (3)

• Fetus: the radar of maternal stress, a cohort study
• Non-invasive biomarkers of fetal brain development reflecting prenatal stress: an integrative multi-scale multi-species perspective on data collection and analysis
• Can a composite heart rate variability biomarker shed new insights about autism spectrum disorder in school-aged children?

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Detection of Maternal and Fetal Stress from the Electrocardiogram with Self-Supervised Representation Learning