"My suspicion is that the vaccine decreases your risk of the kind of COVID case that would impact your fetus," Siegel said. Importantly, Siegel said, vaccination decreases disease severity. "We also don't know, and this is the most important thing, if neurodevelopmental delays or other neurological issues correlated with the severity of illness," he said. In addition, it is not known if breakthrough infections after vaccination might result in similar developmental problems. He added that the effects of virus strains like Omicron remain unclear. "This is of concern and requires further study, and also emphasizes that getting the vaccine during pregnancy is not only safe but also decreases your risk of having problems with the baby from COVID itself," Siegel said. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, said that the study showed that even if a fetus doesn't get COVID from the mother, inflammation from the disease may cause problems after delivery. The most common problems involved motor function, and speech and language difficulties.ĭr. In all, 222 of the mothers had tested positive for COVID-19.Īmong those women, 14% had a preterm delivery, compared with about 9% of the women who weren't infected.Īnd, the investigators found, 6% of children born to infected moms had a developmental problem during their first year of life, compared with 3% of those whose moms weren't infected. "Our study doesn't speak to vaccination effects, but if it encourages more women to seek vaccination, that would be a great outcome."įor the study, Perlis and his team collected data on nearly 7,800 births at six Massachusetts hospitals between March and September of 2020. "There are so many good reasons to be vaccinated, regardless of pregnancy status," he said. These potential dangers are another good reason for pregnant women and those who plan to get pregnant to get the COVID-19 vaccine. "Our study focused on pregnancies that occurred earlier in the pandemic, so we do not know if there might be strain-specific effects, but we will certainly look at this in future studies," Perlis noted.
"But we do not know the precise mechanism, if any," Perlis said.Īnd, he added, as variants of SARS-CoV-2 appear, they may affect babies in different ways. Perlis said it will be important to follow the children with developmental difficulties, because other differences may emerge as they get older.Īlthough it's unclear how COVID-19 might cause these developmental problems, other studies have suggested that anything that causes inflammation during pregnancy can be tied to changes in brain development. "It is entirely possible that these differences between exposed and unexposed children will become smaller over time, as the developing brain is incredibly resilient." They also did not have any other abnormalities," Perlis said. "The vast majority of offspring of mothers infected with COVID-19, even if they were delivered preterm, did not have these neurodevelopmental diagnoses. Perlis stressed that the abnormalities were rare and most infants were developmentally normal. Roy Perlis, director of the Center for Quantitative Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "The kinds of diagnoses we see are delays in motor and speech milestones, but it's important to recognize that these are very nonspecific and may well resolve over time," said lead researcher Dr.
The greatest risk was in the third trimester, the study found. Researchers found that pregnant women with COVID-19 were more likely to have preterm births and infants with developmental problems. FRIDAY, J(HealthDay News) - The babies of women infected with COVID-19 during pregnancy may have developmental difficulties during their first year, a new study suggests.
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