Publications by authors named "Catherine E M Aiken"
Background: Although maternal hemoglobin levels during pregnancy are commonly associated with perinatal outcomes, their link to childhood neurodevelopment remains uncertain.
Objective: This study aimed to examine the associations between maternal hemoglobin in early and late pregnancy and the educational attainment of offspring mid-childhood in a high-resource obstetric setting.
Study Design: Pregnancy data from a prospective birth cohort (Pregnancy Outcome Prediction Study, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2008-2012, N=3285) were linked to mid-childhood educational outcomes (Department for Education, United Kingdom).
Article Synopsis
- Previous research indicates that gestational diabetes may lead to poorer cognitive outcomes in children, but factors like maternal body mass index (BMI) have been overlooked.
- This study analyzed data from the Pregnancy Outcome Prediction Study to see how maternal BMI and gestational diabetes individually affect children's educational success from ages 5 to 7.
- Results demonstrate that children born to mothers with a BMI of 25 kg/m or higher are about 50% more likely to fall short of educational standards, while gestational diabetes alone showed no significant impact on educational attainment.*
The early life environment can have profound impacts on the developing conceptus in terms of both growth and morphogenesis. These impacts can manifest in a variety of ways, including congenital fetal anomalies, placental dysfunction with subsequent effects on fetal growth, and adverse perinatal outcomes, or via effects on long-term health outcomes that may not be detected until later childhood or adulthood. Two key examples of environmental influences on early development are explored: maternal hyperglycaemia and gestational hypoxia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfter fertilization, the mammalian conceptus undergoes cleavage, a process of cell proliferation in the absence of interphase growth. It is not known when cleavage ends and gives way to fully replicative cell cycles with a stable nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio. We have used two-photon excitation and confocal microscopy to measure directly volumes and nucleo-cytoplasmic ratios of whole murine concepti and their individual constituent blastomeres during pre-implantation development up to the early uterine attachment stage (day 5).
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