Fetale Programmierung der neurokognitiven Fähigkeiten im Kindesalter

Fetal brain development is a fundamental milestone for children's cognitive abilities later in life. Maternal influences during pregnancy such as stress have been implicated in ontogeny of cognitive dysfunction. About 12 % of pregnant women suffer from chronic stress such as depression. The number of unrecognized women whose unborn children are exposed to prenatal challenges such as daily stress is likely very high, considering that the World Health Organization describes stress as a global burden and projects that high stress levels will soon account for increasing disabilities. Consequently, professional obstetric care of pregnant women, similar to established procedures in other countries, requires an assessment of mental well-being of the expectant mother. Solely through basic medical consultation this is often challenging because of constantly changing risk and protective factors. As a result, a pregnancy stress screening is required, which allows identifying mothers who are suffering from stress using different psychodiagnostic tests in order to provide further support. For this purpose, we offer a short overview of common, internationally established test procedures, which can be selected based on individual symptoms. Thus, the use of stress screening, which is firmly established in clinical gynecological private practice over the long term, could reduce the susceptibility of children to disease in later life by taking targeted measures to reduce stress during pregnancy, hereby ameliorating the risk for neurocognitive malfunctions later in life of the children.