Exploring the impact of maternal early life adversity on interoceptive sensibility in pregnancy: implications for prenatal depression.

Purpose: Pregnancy is a sensitive period of development in adult life characterized by massive changes in physical, emotional, and cognitive function. Such changes may be adaptive, e.g., facilitating adjustment to physical demands, but they may also reflect or contribute to risks inherent to this stage of life, e.g., prenatal depression. One cognitive ability that may undergo change during pregnancy and contribute to mental wellness is interoception - the ability to perceive, integrate, and model sensory information originating from the body. Strong interoceptive abilities are associated with lower rates of depression in non-pregnant adult populations, and interoception is generally weaker in individuals at higher risk for depression, for example, exposure to early life adversity (ELA). In the present online, cross-sectional study, we investigated whether interoception in pregnant women differed based on histories of ELA, in ways that increased their relative risk for prenatal depression symptoms.

Methods: The pregnant individuals were in the second trimester of their first pregnancy and were compared to a group of nulliparous, non-parenting women.

Results: Previous exposure to ELA significantly moderated pregnancy-related differences in self-reported interoception (interoceptive sensibility). A further moderated-mediation analysis revealed that the extent to which interoceptive sensibility buffered against depressive symptoms was conditional on ELA exposure, suggesting more ELA is associated with lower interoceptive sensibility during pregnancy, which increased prenatal depression risk.

Conclusions: Together this work suggests that levels of interoception during pregnancy are sensitive to previous adversity exposure. It also suggests that interoceptive-focused interventions for preventing/treating prenatal depressive symptoms in high-risk women may be worth exploring.