Psychological, endocrine and polygenic predictors of emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in a longitudinal birth cohort
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected the lives of families, and the well-being of children and their parent. Prenatal stress, dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and genetic factors might influence individuals’ well-being in the presence of a major stressor such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The present work is part of an ongoing birth cohort study and aims to investigate maternal perceived stress, early childhood HPA axis activity, and polygenic risk scores (PRSs) as predictors of emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. All participants are part of the ongoing birth cohort study POSEIDON. Emotional well-being of children ( n =263) and mothers ( n =241) was assessed during the COVID-19 pandemic using the CRISIS questionnaire in two waves between June 2020 and February 2021. Associations of well-being with previously assessed maternal perceived stress, children’s salivary and morning urine cortisol at 45 months, PRSs for depression, schizophrenia, loneliness were investigated.
A positive association between the children’s and mothers’ emotional well-being was found. Lower emotional well-being was observed in both children and mothers during the pandemic compared to before. Children’s emotional well-being improved over the course of the pandemic. Prenatally assessed maternal perceived stress was associated with a decrease in children’s but not in the mothers’ well-being. Cortisol measures and PRSs were not significantly associated with emotional wellbeing.
The present study confirms that emotional well-being of children and mothers are linked, and were negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with differences in development over time.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.02.03.22270311: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg approved the study.
Consent: Before participation, all families provided written informed consent.Sex as a biological variable 410 pregnant women about 4-8 weeks prior to delivery were recruited for the first study wave (T1) from October 2010 to March 2013, at three obstetric clinics in the Rhine-Neckar Region of Germany. Randomization A SNP set filtered for high quality SNPs (MAF > 0.20, missingness = 0, HWE p > 0.02) and LD pruning (pairwise r2 < 0.1 within a 200 SNP window) was used to filter for relatedness and population structure and cryptically related (π□ > 0.20) subjects were excluded at random. Bl… SciScore for 10.1101/2022.02.03.22270311: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg approved the study.
Consent: Before participation, all families provided written informed consent.Sex as a biological variable 410 pregnant women about 4-8 weeks prior to delivery were recruited for the first study wave (T1) from October 2010 to March 2013, at three obstetric clinics in the Rhine-Neckar Region of Germany. Randomization A SNP set filtered for high quality SNPs (MAF > 0.20, missingness = 0, HWE p > 0.02) and LD pruning (pairwise r2 < 0.1 within a 200 SNP window) was used to filter for relatedness and population structure and cryptically related (π□ > 0.20) subjects were excluded at random. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis A post-hoc power analysis was calculated for the primary hypothesis, emotional well-being of children, using GPower 3.1.9.7 Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources The online survey was created with REDCap, a web application for building and managing online surveys (Harris et al., 2019). REDCapsuggested: (REDCap, RRID:SCR_003445)Quality control and filtering was performed using PLINK 1.9 (Chang et al., 2015), according to recommendations published in Turner et al. (Turner et al., 2011). PLINKsuggested: (PLINK, RRID:SCR_001757)PRSs for depression (PRS-DEP), schizophrenia (PRS-Schizophrenia) and loneliness (PRS-Loneliness) were calculated using PRSice 2.1.6 (Choi and O’Reilly, 2019). PRSicesuggested: (PRSice, RRID:SCR_017057)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The present study has several limitations. First, data acquisition only took place online or via mailed questionnaires. None of the participants were interviewed face to face, due to the restrictions. Second, the children did not answer the questions themselves. The main parent caregiver, in most cases the mother, answered the questions about the child. There is possible bias as answers about the emotional well-being of the child are influenced by the caregiver’s perspective and his/her own mental distress (De Los Reyes and Kazdin, 2005). In particular, the association between the mother’s and the child’s well-being could be affected by that bias. Third, there were only two assessments. Since the pandemic is not over, it would be interesting to pursue the course of mental health linked to the prevailing circumstances. Fourth, the questionnaires assessing three months prior to the pandemic were answered retrospectively, therefore biases and pitfalls could emerge from that assessment. Fifth, our sample had limited diversity (mostly high educational background and high socio-economic status) and may not be representative of the general population. The present study is among the first longitudinal birth cohort studies assessing the impact of prenatal stress on children’s emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of internationally established and validated screening instruments to assess mental health enables comparison with other studies. The study contributes t...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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