Medical Bulletin 08/ March/ 2025 - Video

Psychosocial stress during pregnancy could lead to higher blood pressure during the first year postpartum according to research from Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The study, published in Hypertension and supported by the National Institutes of Health, investigated whether mothers who reported higher perceived stress and depressive symptoms during pregnancy, developed higher blood pressure in the four-year period after birth. The findings showed higher stress and depressive symptoms during pregnancy were associated with greater blood pressure during the first year postpartum, but associations diminished thereafter.

The study included data from 225 mothers. In addition to prenatal psychosocial stress, Pardo explored whether prenatal neighborhood social cohesion was a protective factor for postpartum hypertension risk—a first investigation of its kind. This refers to the sense of connection and trust a pregnant woman experiences in her community. According to her findings, social structures that promoted cohesion may have had a positive influence throughout pregnancy into the postpartum period and were associated with lower blood pressure.

The real-world application of this study calls for the identification of vulnerable individuals in the pregnant population, offering interventions to reduce stress and depressive symptoms. Similarly, it emphasizes the importance of monitoring women’s health after birth, through the provision of additional hypertension screenings among mothers who experience higher prenatal stress.

Ref: Pardo N, Eckel S P et al. Prenatal Psychosocial Stressors and Blood Pressure Across 4 Years Postpartum. Hypertension. https://doi.org/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.124.23979

Research has shown that young people who face adversity such as traumatic or stressful events during brain development are 40% more likely to develop anxiety disorders by adulthood. But most people who endure these experiences during childhood and adolescence prove to be resilient to these mental health effects. A new Yale study finds that when this adversity occurs during brain development may affect how susceptible people are to anxiety and other psychiatric problems as adults.

According to the study, published in the journal Communications Psychology, experiencing low-to-moderate levels of adversity during middle childhood and adolescence may foster resilience to anxiety later in life. The researchers found that those individuals who developed resilience to mental health challenges exhibited distinct patterns of brain activation when asked to differentiate between danger and safety, a process that is known to be disrupted in people with anxiety disorders.

For the study, the researchers assessed patterns of adversity exposure in 120 adults across four stages of development: early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Using neuroimaging technology, they examined participants’ corticolimbic circuitry (a network of brain regions that integrates emotion, cognition, and memory), extracting measures of neural activation as participants viewed cues that signaled either threat or safety.

“The people who showed low or moderate levels of adversity exposure in middle childhood and adolescence had statistically lower levels of anxiety than either the first group, which had the lowest levels of adversity overall, or the third group, which had the highest levels of adversity exposure,” said Lucinda Sisk, the lead author of the study.

Three latent profiles emerged: (1) a group with lower lifetime adversity, higher neural activation to threat, and lower neural activation to safety; (2) a group with moderate adversity during middle childhood and adolescence, lower neural activation to threat, and higher neural activation to safety; and (3) a group with higher lifetime adversity exposure and minimal neural activation to both threat and safety. Individuals in the second profile had lower anxiety than the other profiles.

These findings demonstrate how variability in within-person combinations of adversity exposure and neural threat/safety discrimination can differentially relate to anxiety, and suggest that for some individuals, moderate adversity exposure during middle childhood and adolescence could be associated with processes that foster resilience to future anxiety.

Ref: Sisk, L.M., Keding, T.J., Ruiz, S. et al. Person-centered analyses reveal that developmental adversity at moderate levels and neural threat/safety discrimination are associated with lower anxiety in early adulthood. Commun Psychol 3, 31 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00193-x

Our perceptions of body image are shaped by what we see from as early as seven years old, according to new research by Durham University. The research also found that these body ideals continue to be influenced by visual exposure to different body weights into adulthood. The results show that people’s perceptions of body weight are flexible and adult-like from seven years of age onwards and have implications for our understanding of body size and the perceptions, and possible misperceptions, of weight in health and wellbeing.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, found that children as young as seven years old adjust how heavy or light they rate other people’s bodies after seeing a series of pictures of low or high weight bodies. The research involved more than 200 individuals aged seven through to adulthood, also indicated that media influences known to shape adult body perceptions can almost certainly impact children to the same degree, starting from early childhood and continuing to evolve into adulthood.

Participants viewed bodies ranging from low to high weight before and after being adapted to bodies with very low or very high body mass. Participants of all ages showed a significant change in their weight estimates after being adapted to larger bodies (but not to smaller bodies), suggesting that this aspect of body perception is functionally mature by 7 years.

Hence, it was concluded that perceptions of body weight are subject to adaptation aftereffects that are adult-like from 7 years of age onward. Thus. these results have implications for our understanding of body size (mis)perception in health and well-being contexts as well as for our broader understanding of the development of body perception.

Ref: Anjali Batish, Amelia Parchment, Evan Handy, Martin J Tovée, Lynda G Boothroyd, Body size aftereffects are adult-like from 7 years onward, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2025,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106203.