Stress, in utero

The effects of pandemic response will certainly be long lasting. But can you imagine a scenario where the response impacts someone who was not born until after the full force of the hysteria ended?

As soon as the public health officials egged on by the media, or the media egged on by public health officials, began their ubiquitous campaign of fear, they likely impacted the next generation in minute ways that will never, ever be fully realized. Most researchers will not even consider studying the impacts on the next generation, and, indeed, the impacts may actually be so profound that they create a great deal of noise for honest researchers.

This 2018 study from Persson and Rosslin-Slater is exactly why.

The study uses Swedish administrative data from 1973 to 2011 and measures the impact of in utero stress on children and adults. Cleverly, the researchers do so by exploiting the quasi-random nature of close kin deaths pre- and post-birth to examine the relative differences between physical and mental health outcomes.

The authors go to great lengths to justify the modest assumptions they need to make, and, honestly, I do not see anything missing or hidden that they do not explicitly make note of. In their identifying assumption (ie., were the characteristics of the mothers that experienced a maternal loss different), there was a slight positive correlation between treatment and first parity births (first “completed” pregnancy) and a slight negative correlation between treatment and the mother being foreign-born.

The former difference was due to differences in the seasonality of deaths. As for the latter difference, the authors identified an abnormal distribution of deaths in relatives close to foreign-born mothers around 400-500 days post-conception, and the analysis was robust when dropping foreign-born mothers from the calculation. They also did a multitude of other robustness checks on their work is credible, well constructed, and well articulated.

In any case, the authors find:

In sum, our results show that the death of a relative up to three generations apart during pregnancy has far-reaching consequences for physical health at birth and in the first year of life, as well as for mental health during childhood and adulthood.

Though, they note that the physical health effects that they observed do correct over time, the mental health effects are quite significant. They also note several times throughout their analysis that other forms of stress can cause similar results.

Our calculation suggests that in utero exposure to stress from unemployment may lead to a 17.3 percent increase in the likelihood of ever purchasing a drug to treat ADHD in middle childhood, and 9 and 5.5 percent increases in the likelihoods of ever purchasing drugs to treat anxiety and depression in adulthood, respectively

Interestingly, even though the magnitudes the authors find are significant and large¹, the authors note that they are on the very low end (though within confidence intervals) of what previous research has found, which may very well be due to the fact they are using Swedish data. These effects may be even more pronounced in other countries².

One of the things that is different about the pandemic hysteria is everyone is getting a full dose of the stress despite the fact that the virus is really only particularly harmful to the elderly (and even the level of harm is far below what the media advertises). Even for those not afraid of the virus, which would mostly include the unvaccinated, they are increasing their stress further with mandates, passports, and social segregation in what seems like an attempt to destroy the control group if nothing else.

The completely synthetic elevation in rhetoric by dumb or evil public health officials and the media for the better part of two and a half years now means that there will likely be millions of children suffering the mental health effects of the pandemic response even if all remaining measures are dropped immediately. What a mess.

1. They find a 12% increase in low birthweigh, 24% increase in very low birth weight, 3% increase in c-section delivery, 25% increase in ADHD, 13% increase in anxiety, 8% increase in depression

2. Specifically, the authors note “These differences in effect sizes could arise for a number of reasons, including that we are (a) studying different institutional contexts (a high-income country with a large social safety net vs. developing countries), (b) estimating effects of different types of shocks (in utero exposure to maternal stress from bereavement vs. malnutrition), and (c) measuring mental health in different ways (prescription drug take-up vs. survey responses)”.