Long after houses and roads have been rebuilt following natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes, there are human health implications to take into account according to researchers at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. Their study, to be published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, shows that the hardship experienced by pregnant women during the Quebec ice storm in 1998 affected their unborn children’s long-term development.

These findings may inspire intervention strategies to help expectant moms during times of crisis and to help their children integrate smoothly with their peers. “This is the first study to evaluate the long term effects of maternal stress from a disaster on children’s cognitive development,” says Douglas researcher and first author, David Laplante, PhD. “This study is part of a long-term follow-up study, which included evaluations of children at two years of age. In the current study we were able to thoroughly assess the children, who were now school-aged. Our findings show that children from moms who experienced high levels of hardship from the ice storm scored about 10 points lower on IQ, and also scored lower on language performance tests than those whose mothers had less severe hardship.”

“It is very important to note that all children scored within the normal range of these tests,” adds Suzanne King, PhD, senior author, Douglas researcher, and McGill Professor of Psychiatry. “We are struck by these results for two reasons: first, it is the mother's objective degree of exposure to hardship from the ice storm, such as the number of days without electricity and the degree of financial loss, and not her subjective level of distress, which is responsible for these effects; secondly, we expected that the effects of stress exposure during the pregnancy on the children’s development would dissipate by school age, but this has not been the case.”

Drs. Laplante, King, and colleagues obtained information about the ice storm experiences of 178 women who were pregnant during the Quebec 1998 ice storm. For 89 of these families, they then assessed the development of their children at five-and-a-half years of age. The
children underwent in-depth assessments of their physical, cognitive, and behavioral development. Their findings showed that the babies born to pregnant women who were exposed to high levels of hardship had significantly poorer verbal intelligence and language skills than those exposed to lower stress levels. They also demonstrated that there was little association between the objective degree of a woman’s stress exposure and how distressed she was about it.

“Project Ice Storm is pivotal in evaluating the real impact of the environment on the origins of human mental health,” says Remi Quirion PhD, scientific director of the Douglas and of the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). “It is the CIHR’s mandate to support such research, which provides new knowledge of the biological and socio-cultural processes underlying neurological, mental and addictive disorders. We seek to translate this into a better quality of life for all Canadians through improved health outcomes, health promotion and health care services.”

This study was supported by funding from the Douglas Research Centre, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Fond de la Recherche en Santé du Québec, and the McGill University Stairs Memorial Fund.