Cited by 189Child Abuse and TraumaMaternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and PostpartumBirth, Development, and Health

Intergenerational Effect of Maternal Exposure to Childhood Maltreatment on Newborn Brain Anatomy

Open access
Moog, Nora K., Entringer, Sonja, Rasmussen, Jerod M., Styner, Martin, Gilmore, John H., Kathmann, Norbert, Heim, Christine M., Wadhwa, Pathik D. +1 more·2018·Biological Psychiatry

Abstract

Background Childhood maltreatment (CM) confers deleterious long-term consequences, and growing evidence suggests some of these effects may be transmitted across generations. We examined the intergenerational effect of maternal CM exposure on child brain structure and also addressed the hypothesis that this effect may start during the child's intrauterine period of life.Methods A prospective longitudinal study was conducted in a clinical convenience sample of 80 mother-child dyads. Maternal CM exposure was assessed using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Structural magnetic resonance imaging was employed to characterize newborn global and regional brain (tissue) volumes near the time of birth.Results CM exposure was reported by 35% of the women. Maternal CM exposure was associated with lower child intracranial volume (F 1,70 = 6.84, p = .011), which was primarily due to a global difference in cortical gray matter (F 1,70 = 9.10, p = .004). The effect was independent of potential confounding variables, including maternal socioeconomic status, obstetric complications, obesity, recent interpersonal violence, pre- and early postpartum stress, gestational age at birth, infant sex, and postnatal age at magnetic resonance imaging scan. The observed group difference between offspring of CM-exposed mothers versus nonexposed mothers was 6%.Conclusions These findings represent the first report to date associating maternal CM exposure with variation in newborn brain structure. These observations support our hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of the effects of maternal CM exposure on child brain development and suggest this effect may originate during the child's intrauterine period of life, which may have downstream neurodevelopmental consequences.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.07.009

Cites

59 of 59 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Maternal exposure to child abuse was associated with smaller intracranial volume, due to differences in cortical gray matter, in newborns examined within two weeks of birth.

    “In another study, maternal exposure to child abuse was associated with smaller intracranial volume, due to differences in cortical gray matter, in newborns examined within two weeks of birth 75 .”

    From Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms (2018) · cites this paper as [75]

    The Results (Global brain and tissue volumes; page unavailable) associate maternal childhood maltreatment with smaller newborn intracranial volume, principally reflecting lower cortical gray-matter volume. But the Methods (Procedures; page unavailable) report scans at 5–64 days after birth, with a mean of 26 days—not within two weeks. The exposure measure also included childhood neglect as well as abuse. (LLM, conf=0.93)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 61 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Moog, N. K., Entringer, S., Rasmussen, J. M., Styner, M., Gilmore, J. H., Kathmann, N., Heim, C. M., Wadhwa, P. D., & Buss, C.
Affiliations
  • Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE)
  • University of California, Irvine (US)
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
Corresponding author
Buss, Claudia
Venue
Biological Psychiatry
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2018-01
Volume
83
Issue
2
Pages
120-127
ISSN
0006-3223 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2737148630
Cited by
189
References
61
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 15 · 2017: 1
FWCI
21.65
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Biological Psychiatry (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) (submittedVersion)
  • eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
  • UNC Libraries
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health (R01 HD-060628, UG3 OD-O23349, R01 MH-091351, CB, R01 MH-105538)
  • U.S. Public Health Service
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Birth, Development, and Health
Keywords
child abuse, intergenerational transmission, maternal exposure, brain tissue volume, intrauterine period, brain development, mother-child dyads, prenatal stress
MeSH terms
Adult, Brain, Female, Humans, Infant, Newborn, Longitudinal Studies, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Mother-Child Relations, Mothers, Organ Size, Pregnancy, Prenatal Exposure Delayed Effects, Prospective Studies, Maternal Exposure, Adult Survivors of Child Abuse

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review