Reprint of "Epigenetics, maternal prenatal psychosocial stress, and infant mental health"

"Mombrain and Sticky DNA": The Impacts of Neurobiological and Epigenetic Framings of Motherhood on Women's Subjectivities

The fields of epigenetics and neuroscience have come to occupy a significant place in individual and public life in biomedicalized societies. Social scientists have argued that the primacy and popularization of the "neuro" has begun to shape how patients and other lay people experience themselves and their lifeworlds in increasingly neurological and genetic terms. Pregnant women and new mothers have become an important new target for cutting edge neuroscientific and epigenetic research, with the Internet constituting a highly active space for engagement with knowledge translations. In this paper, we analyze the reception by women in North America of translations of nascent epigenetic and neuroscientific research. We conducted three focus groups with pregnant women and new mothers. The study was informed by a prior scoping investigation of online content. Our focus group findings record how engagement with translations of epigenetic and neuroscientific research impact women's perinatal experience, wellbeing, and self-construal. Three themes emerged in our analysis: (1) A kind of brain; (2) The looping effects of biomedical narratives; (3) Imprints of past experience and the management of the future. This data reveals how mothers engage with the neurobiological style-of-thought increasingly characteristic of public health and popular science messaging around pregnancy and motherhood. Through the molecularization of pregnancy and child development, a typical passage of life becomes saturated with "susceptibility," "risk," and the imperative to preemptively make "healthy' choices." This, in turn, redefines and shapes the experience of what it is to be a "good," "healthy," or "responsible" mother/to-be.

Birth Cohorts in Highly Contaminated Sites: A Tool for Monitoring the Relationships Between Environmental Pollutants and Children's Health

Industrial areas are characterized by the dispersion of environmental stressors that could possibly have long-term detrimental effects on both human health and the environment. Environmental contamination has been indicated to be one of the major risks for reproductive health. In this context, the effects of environmental pollution on pregnant women living in heavily polluted areas is of special interest. In fact, fetal development is a crucial phase due to the dynamic interaction between the maternal/external environments and the developing organs and tissues. Moreover, following Barker's postulate of the intrauterine origin of health and disease, the events occurring in this time window could affect future health. Birth cohorts provide the most suitable design for assessing the association between early-life and possible long-term health outcomes in highly contaminated sites. By providing an assessment of the early life environment throughout the collection of biological samples, birth cohorts offer the opportunity to study in-depth several possible confounders and outcomes by means of questionnaires and follow-ups based on clinical evaluations and bio-specimen samplings. The exposome comprises the totality of exposures from conception onwards; the birth cohort approach allows the integration of the exposures as a whole, including those related to socioeconomic status, with "omics" data from biological samples collected at birth and throughout life. In the characterization of the "fetal exposome," the placenta represents a highly informative and scarcely considered organ. For this purpose, the "Neonatal Environment and Health Outcomes" (NEHO) birth cohort has been established by enrolling pregnant women residing in contaminated sites and in surrounding areas.