Eleni Jaswa and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted a cohort study and concluded that COVID-19 during pregnancy does not affect the neurodevelopmental development of the child up to the age of two. The analysis included 2,003 pregnant women aged 18 years and older (mean 33.3 years) from all 50 US states and Puerto Rico, who were enrolled in the prospective ASPIRE cohort before 10 weeks of gestation from May 2020 to August 2021. They provided information about themselves (including COVID-19), pregnancy and childbirth, and completed the ASQ-3 child development questionnaire when the child was 12, 18, and 24 months old. The results were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The data were obtained for 1,757 children aged 12 months, 1,522 children aged 18 months, and 1,523 children aged 24 months. Any impairment in communication, gross and fine motor skills, problem-solving, and social skills was detected in 32.3 percent versus 29.4 percent of women at these ages who had and did not have COVID-19; 22.4 percent versus 20.5 percent; and 19.2 percent versus 16.8 percent, respectively. After processing the data with mixed-effects logistic regression models accounting for the influence of covariates, the difference between the offspring of women who had and did not have COVID-19 during pregnancy was statistically insignificant. The risk remained insignificant when analyzed separately by gestational trimester, the presence of fever during infection, and previous vaccination.