(ANSA) – ROME, JANUARY 05 – Exposure to Covid-19 in utero does not affect the neurological development of the unborn child, however children born during the pandemic may have a development of social and motor skills at 6 months slightly lower than those of children born before the pandemic. This was revealed by a study by Columbia University Irving Medical Center, published in Jama Pediatrics, which analyzes the results of developmental monitoring tests of 255 children born at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Allen Hospital in NewYork between March and December 2020.
Babies born around that time had lower scores than those born before the pandemic regardless of whether their mothers had Covid-19 during pregnancy or not.
“Babies born to mothers who have viral infections during pregnancy have a higher risk of neurodevelopmental deficits, so we thought we’d detect some changes in the neurodevelopment of babies whose mothers had Covid during pregnancy,” says Dani Dumitriu of the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, first author of the study. “We were surprised to find absolutely no signs that Covid exposure in utero was linked to neurodevelopmental deficits.”
In addition, for children born in the Covid era, development monitoring scores were slightly lower in areas such as motor and social skills, but not in others, such as communication or problem-solving skills. . “These were not large differences, which means that we did not find a higher rate of actual developmental delays in our sample of a few hundred children, but only small changes in the mean scores between groups,” Dumitriu points out.
For the researcher, however, “these small changes deserve attention because at the population level they can have a significant impact on public health“. (HANDLE).
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