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sesam Teilprojekt C: Identification of pre-, peri-, and postnatal risk factors

Research Project
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01.10.2007
 - 31.12.2010

The period of fetal and newborn development is a sensitive and vulnerable time in the life cycle of the child. Maternal influences on child's development have long been subjects of scrutiny. Nevertheless those ascendancies seem to start prior to birth and have the potential to be profound. A new area of research addresses the impact of maternal well-being during pregnancy and in early infancy on child's behavior. Special interest is put on the interplay between mother and child in pregnancy and early parenthood. Understanding this link is critical in understanding the mechanisms by which maternal stress or psychopathology alters peri- and postnatal outcomes. Such understanding also has potential clinical application in developing interventions to prevent deleterious antenatal conditions. The focus of our project "The role of early life conditions in shaping behavioral development and it's implications for mother-infant interactions" is on the role of maternal psychological functioning on fetal/infant's development. I We will assess psychological and biological determinants of pre- and postnatal program-ming. We hypothesize that maternal psycho-social and biological distress during pregnancy will program stress related hormones and cy-tokines. As consequences of risk factors be-fore and in early pregnancy we expect biobe-havioral differences in mothers, fetuses and mother-infant dyads. In addition, we expect that newborns will exhibit differences in endo-crine, immune, autonomic and behavioral stress reactivity in the psychobiological as-sessments. The overall aim is to identify and describe neu-rophenotypes in mothers and infants by - gene x environment interactions - pharmacoepigenetics - risk-factors - biomarkers - methods (microarrays, etc.) We will promote a transdisciplinary model of research that respects multiple levels of analy-sis and explanation, literally from the sociologi-cal to the genetic, and to bridge the conceptual divide that separates disciplines.

Members (7)

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Margarete Bolten

Principal Investigator
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Gunther Meinlschmidt

Principal Investigator
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Dirk H. Hellhammer

Principal Investigator
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Irina Alexandra Nast

Project Member
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Marta Barbara Skrundz

Project Member
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Rahel Schneider

Project Member
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