Parental childhood maltreatment associates with offspring left amygdala volume at early infancy

Abstract Background Childhood maltreatment exposure (CME) and related trauma could be considered some of psychiatry’s greatest public health challenges. CME and early adversity have been associated with increased amygdala volume in exposed individuals. Emerging evidence implies that CME could also affect prenatal development of the offspring. Methods As part of the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, we measured bilateral amygdala volumes from MR images in 76 healthy infants at 2–5 weeks of gestation corrected age and obtained the Trauma and Distress Scale (TADS) questionnaire from both parents. The associations between neonatal amygdala volumes and TADS scores were examined in stepwise regression models. Results We found that maternal CME associated positively with infant left amygdala volume (p = .045) while the positive association for the paternal trauma score was only marginally significant (p = .099). Similar associations were not observed for the right amygdala. In the exploratory analyses, we used age ranges (0–6, 7–12, and 13–18 years) as estimate of the timing of the CME and included all three time points from both parents using left amygdala volume into the stepwise regression models. We found that maternal TADS scores from 13–18 years of age associated positively with infant left amygdala volumes (p = .008). Correspondingly, paternal TADS scores from 0–6 years of age associated positively with the infant left amygdala volumes (p = .014). Conclusions Our link the infant offspring amygdala volume with parental CME with some agreement with prior findings, and they also imply links paternal CME to infant amygdala volumes. Amygdala is one of the key brain structures associated with both early life exposures and later psychiatric health, which makes it crucially important to elucidate both the underlying mechanisms and the later relevance of these associations in future studies.