Even unborn infants are affected by discrimination

A noteworthy recent study by researchers at Yale University in the US has uncovered some unsettling findings that suggest that when a pregnant woman experiences discrimination, it affects the brain circuitry of her infant.

The research, published in Neuropsychopharmacology in 2023, adds a new dimension to our understanding of the impact of discrimination. The negative impact of discrimination on human health has been previously researched. For example, a 2019 study in Health Services Research showed that discrimination is a newly-emerging risk factor for a broad range of health outcomes and if a person doesn’t have emotional support from family, friends, and supportive professionals, the outcomes can be even worse.

Despite the growing body of empirical evidence on the effects of discrimination on health, the Yale study is the first to look at the damage done to the brain circuitry of unborn children when their mothers experience discrimination.

For this study, 165 pregnant women were given established questionnaires and all participants were aged between 14 and 19 years. In terms of ethnicity, most of the participants were Hispanic (88 per cent) and living in New York, US. Each was asked about their experiences of discrimination and ‘acculturation’, meaning life experiences due to migration.

Following the birth of their child, 38 of the infants underwent MRI to assess their brain connectivity. The authors said that their first objective was to establish whether discrimination and acculturation result in effects that are distinct from other types of stressors.

The MRI data from the children’s brains showed differences in the brains of those parents who said they experienced discrimination while they were pregnant. A tailored data analysis system helped the researchers to collate the information from the questionnaires and take into account other factors, such as socio-economic status, depression, childhood trauma, and more.

Prof Dustin Scheinost, senior author of the study and Associate Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale School of Medicine, explained: “We thought that some of these experiences might go hand-in-hand or overlap, in which case it would be difficult to measure the effects of discrimination or acculturation on their own.”

“That analysis clustered measures of stress and depression and separately pulled out discrimination and acculturation measures as their own distinct variables,” said Prof Scheinost.

“That [data analysis] told us that while these experiences of discrimination are related to stress and depression, they are separate enough that we can look at their unique effects.”

They found an identifiable weaker connection between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex among the children whose mothers reported discrimination during their pregnancy.

They found an identifiable weaker connection between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex among the children whose mothers reported discrimination during their pregnancy

“Our finding was consistent with what you expect to see in the brain of those affected by early life adversity either pre- or postnatally,” Prof Scheinost added.

“We don’t fully know why this happens, so we need to investigate the biological mechanisms that carry these experiences of adversity from parent to offspring.”

You can read more about the study here: www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01765-3