Pregnant women who have COVID-19 during their pregnancy give birth to children with a higher risk of alterations in neurological development, compared to those born to mothers who have not passed the disease at this stage. This has been revealed by a preliminary analysis presented at the 30th European Congress of Psychiatry.
This finding could indicate that there is a risk to the baby when it is exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the womb, something that divides experts and is still being investigated in many studies. Dr. Rosa Ayesa Arriola, leader of this research, has reported that not all babies of infected mothers have these differences in neurological development, but they have observed a greater probability of this happening, especially when the infection is contracted in the third trimester of pregnancy.
The work was carried out with a sample of 21 pregnant women with COVID-19 and 21 healthy pregnant women who formed the control group. All underwent hormonal and biochemical tests to measure cortisol or immune response, salivary tests, movement tests, and psychological questionnaires.
Prenatal exposure to coronavirus could affect motor function
The results indicated that the babies of the infected pregnant women had greater difficulties in relaxing and adapting their bodies when they are held in the arms, in addition to having worse control of the movement of the head and shoulders at six months of birth, so being exposed to the coronavirus in the womb could affect the motor function of fetuses.
The authors found that babies born to mothers with COVID reacted slightly differently when held or hugged.
“We found that certain items on the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) measurement, which measures infant movement and behavior, changed in 6-week-old infants who had been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Indeed, they react slightly differently when they are picked up or hugged”, explains researcher Águeda Castro Quintas, another of the authors.
The researchers are aware that the sample in this study is very small and no conclusions can yet be drawn. For this reason, Nerea San Martín González, co-author of the study, explained that “in babies who are so small there are several things that we simply cannot measure, such as language skills or cognition. We also need to be aware that this is a comparatively small sample, so we are repeating the work, and we will follow it up over a longer period.”
There are still many unknowns to be resolved about the effects of COVID-19 on pregnancy, for example, it is not known if the effects found in babies could last over time or if they depend on other environmental factors. Therefore, they state that they will continue investigating and urge that special importance be given to prenatal medical control to achieve a healthy pregnancy.
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