Handbook of Clinical Gender Medicine. Группа авторов

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Название Handbook of Clinical Gender Medicine
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Зарубежная психология
Серия
Издательство Зарубежная психология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783805599306



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Exposure to Sex Steroids and Physical, Cognitive, and Behavioral Outcomes

      Baron-Cohen et al. [7] discussed a number of amniocentesis-based correlational studies, which indicate a positive correlation between the mental rotation rate and fetal testosterone and an inverse relation between fetal testosterone levels and language comprehension. The authors used stored samples of amniotic fluid and performed longitudinal studies in these ‘amniocentized children’ over 48 months after delivery. At 12 months of life they correlated fetal testosterone (fT) and the ability to make eye contact as a marker for social development in 71 children. Girls made significantly more eye contact than did boys. Eye contact decreased with increasing levels of fT. The authors further examined language development between 18 and 24 months of age in 87 toddlers and found that girls had a significantly higher vocabulary size than did boys and that there was a significantly inverse relationship between fT and vocabulary size for the children as a group but not within either sex group.

      Maternal and Fetal Nutrition and Programming of Adult Disease

      It is becoming increasingly apparent that many forms of adult disease may have their roots in fetal programming and in early childhood. Obesity is one example: obesity has become a major public health problem affecting the majority of adults in the USA. Extremes of birth weight, i.e. low birth weight and increased birth weight, may cause future obesity and metabolic syndrome. It has been shown that prenatal androgen exposure of female mice causes impaired insulin secretion both as an organizational effect and as an activational effect which is based on defective islet cell function. Chronic diseases like osteoporosis, mood disorders, and psychiatric syndromes as well as polycystic ovary syndrome have been related to fetal programming. Other adult diseases such as cardiovascular disease, a variety of metabolic and endocrine pathologies, diabetes, and various other diseases may also be due to inadequate determination of set points during fetal programming. There is now preliminary evidence that eating disorders, which are more common in females that in males, are organized by low levels of prenatal testosterone and then activated by increasing estrogen levels during puberty in girls.

      The Impact of Maternal Prenatal Stress on the Developing Embryo and Fetus