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 their child up to two years of age. 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 up to 10 weeks of gestation from May 2020 to August 2021. They provided information about themselves (including COVID-19 history), their pregnancy, and childbirth, and completed the ASQ-3 Child Development Questionnaire at 12, 18, and 24 months. The results were published in JAMA Network Open.
Data were obtained for 1,757 children aged 12 months, 1,522 children aged 18 months, and 1,523 children aged 24 months. Any impairments in communication, gross and fine motor skills, problem-solving, and social skills were detected in children of women who had and did not have COVID-19 at these ages, respectively, 32.3 percent versus 29.4 percent; 22.4 percent versus 20.5 percent; and 19.2 percent versus 16.8 percent. After processing the data using mixed-effects logistic regression models accounting for the influence of confounding factors, the difference between the offspring of women who had and did not have COVID-19 during pregnancy was statistically insignificant. The risk remained nonsignificant when analyzed separately by gestational trimester, the presence of fever during infection, and previous vaccination.
