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The problem
Intervention: Prospective assessment of prenatal stress exposure during apartheid and measurement of psychiatric outcomes in exposed children
Who it was tested with: 304 mother-child pairs from Soweto-Johannesburg; mothers enrolled during pregnancy in 1990, children assessed at ages 17-18 in 2007-2008.
Children or communities are compared with a group that did not receive the intervention, or followed over years. This is the design that best separates what the intervention did from everything else that changed.
"Maternal prenatal stress in 1990 was not directly associated greater psychiatric morbidity during at ages 17-18. Maternal age and past household adversity moderated the intergenerational mental health effects of prenatal stress such that children born to younger mothers and late adolescent/young adult children experiencing greater household adversity exhibited worse psychiatric morbidity." The design captures prospective prenatal exposure and later adolescent outcomes, allowing examination of intergenerational effects and moderating factors, though results show complex conditional rather than direct relationships.
The study measured prenatal stress prospectively but psychiatric outcomes retrospectively at adolescence; loss to follow-up from original cohort; single township context; underlying mechanisms not identified; modest sample size (n=304).
Across countries and designs
1 study · 1 country
