Browsing by discipline "Kehityspsykologia"

Goals. Earlier studies have shown that prenatal environment and/or nutrition may program diseases later in life. Over the past few years much interest has emerged on the association between prenatal vitamin D and child's later development. However, there is no earlier research on the connection between prenatal vitamin D and child's sensory processing. Sensory processing problems are common in autism spectrum disorder and previous studies have shown the possible association between prenatal vitamin D and autism spectrum disorder. The goal of this study is to examine whether prenatal vitamin D level is associated with child's sensory processing at the age of one year. Methods. This research is part of a Helsinki University Children's Vitamin D Intervention Trial Study (ViDI). This study includes mothers (n=831), whose vitamin D concentration has been measured in their early and/or late points of pregnancy and who have also filled in Sensory Experience Questionnaire (SEQ) measuring child's sensory features at one-year follow-up. Prenatal vitamin D concentration was split into quadrants and treated as a dichotomous variable. The lowest quadrant reflected "a low vitamin D concentration"-group and rest of the values were named as "a high vitamin D concentration"-group. Prenatal vitamin D level was also analyzed as a continuous variable. The factor analysis was conducted with SEQ. A factor analysis showed that three factor solution fitted the data. These factors, which describe child's sensory features, were named as sensory over-responsivity, sensory under-responsivity and sensory seeking. Linear regression analysis was used to examine the association between prenatal vitamin D concentration and child's sensory features. Conclusions and results. A higher vitamin D level in the late-pregnancy was associated with higher sensory seeking score at one year of age when examined as a continuous variable. When controlling confounding variables (i.e., child's gender, child's date of birth, mother's maternal smoking habits, mother's age, education, marital status and BMI before pregnancy) the association remained significant. There was no statistically significant association between vitamin D level and sensory over-responsivity or sensory under-responsivity scores. Prenatal vitamin D level in early-pregnancy was not associated with child's sensory features, measured either as a continuous or as dichotomous variable. These results are in line with the earlier studies that vitamin D levels in pregnancy might be associated with fetus brain development and that is how prenatal vitamin D concentration might affect fetal programming during the sensitive periods of gestation.