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 (average 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 - 18 months and 1,523 - 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% versus 29.4%; 22.4% versus 20.5% and 19.2% versus 16.8%. After processing the data with mixed-effects logistic regression models taking into account the influence of co-factors, 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.
