Inherited Stress

If a mother experiences a stressful pregnancy, it may increase the child’s risk of anxiety and mental health problems later in life. Researchers are attempting to unravel how this prenatal experience becomes encoded in offspring and have recently discovered, in mice, it may involve changes to the dentate gyrus (pictured) – a region of the brain's hippocampus involved in threat perception. Mice born to mothers who experienced stressful pregnancies – in this case an abnormal inflammatory condition – exhibited increased anxiety compared with control animals, and the anxiety correlated with hyperactivation of particular dentate gyrus neurons (pink). The increased cell activity was linked to epigenetic alterations (tags to the DNA that determine how genes are used) that influenced the activity of genes important in synapses (points of nerve signal passage. Exploring whether similar epigenetic changes are linked to anxiety in humans may ultimately lead to new therapeutic targets. For the time being, though, the work provides cellular evidence for what we already know: the importance of avoiding stress during pregnancy.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Nicole Politowska; research publication authorship: Anika Nabila and colleagues
• Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by Nicole Politowska
• Research published in Cell Reports, September 2025