Maternal psychological distress during gestation is associated with infant food allergy.

Maternal psychological distress (depressive and anxiety) symptoms during gestation are shown to relate to elevated risk of offspring atopic diseases. According to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease theory, this association could result from the programming effect of maternal psychological distress predisposing the offspring to aberrant stress and immune responses. The timing and duration of the distress exposure seem to be relevant but the chronicity aspect has not been studied earlier in humans. We aimed to investigate how the chronicity and severity of maternal distress symptoms during gestation associate with the outcome of infant food allergy at the age of 6 months in nearly 2000 mother-infant dyads from a prospective FinnBrain Birth Cohort.