MASSACHUSETTS: Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, have recently found that babies whose mothers were exposed to prenatal and perinatal depression had baby teeth with thicker neonatal lines.
Neonatal lines have been a marker of tooth enamel growth and found in both primary and permanent dentition. It has also been the sign of a developmental birth defect caused by the metabolic stress on tooth structures when the fetus passes to extrauterine life.
Rebecca V. Mountain, the lead author of the research, and colleagues, examined seventy children's baby teeth to test their hypothesis that children exposed to prenatal and perinatal maternal stressors have wider neonatal lines. They collected the data through questionnaires during pregnancy and shortly after the delivery. They focused on stressful life events, social support, psychopathological history and neighbourhood problems.
Children whose mothers had continuance histories of severe depression or other psychiatric problems and experienced depression or anxiety in the last months of pregnancy were more likely than other kids to have thicker neonatal lines. However, children of mothers who received significant social support shortly after pregnancy tended to have thinner lines.
The researchers gave a possible explanation that mothers experiencing anxiety or depression might produce more cortisol, the stress hormone, which could interfere with the enamel cells.
The research findings would lay the groundwork for absolute interventions to identify the vulnerable children and prevent future mental health disorders years before symptoms.
The study 'Association of Maternal Stress and Social Support During Pregnancy With Growth Marks in Children's Primary Tooth Enamel' has recently been published in JAMA Network Open.
