mothers had caught Covid while pregnant. The risk was about 3% in babies of mothers who did not have the infection. It was also found that catching Covid during the third trimester – which is especially critical for brain development – appeared to add more risk than earlier in pregnancy.
The lags were seen in behaviours such as rolling over, reaching for objects or babbling – basic milestones of infancy. The researchers accounted for race, age and other factors that could explain the different rates of developmental delays.
They also noted that much more research is needed to determine how much risk Covid poses to fetal brain development and how best to minimize it. “It’s going to be important to watch this cohort grow, to see how these children will look in 18 months and two years," said senior author Roy Perlis, director of the Center for Quantitative Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
For now, he said, “If our study encourages more pregnant moms to get vaccinated, or more people considering becoming pregnant to go get vaccinated, that would be fantastic." The study could not assess the impact of vaccination because it examined records from pregnancies between March and September of 2020, before Covid shots were available.