WEDNESDAY, Oct. 23, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- New research offers some comfort to pregnant women who become ill with COVID: Brain development doesn’t appear to be impaired in children exposed to the virus while in the womb.

There’s no significant difference in development at one year, a year and a half and two years after birth between children whose moms had COVID while pregnant and those whose didn’t, researchers reported recently in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“These findings are critical considering the novelty of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the human species, the global scale of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, the now-endemic nature of the virus indicating ongoing relevance for pregnant individuals, the profound host immune response noted in many patients with COVID-19, and the accumulating evidence revealing sensitivity of the developing fetal brain to maternal immune activation,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Eleni Jaswa, a reproductive endocrinologist with the University of California, San Francisco.

For the study, researchers examined data on more than 2,000 new mothers and their children, as part of a study assessing the safety of pregnancy during the pandemic. The new moms were recruited between May 2020 and August 2021.

About 11% of the participating mothers were infected with COVID-19 during pregnancy, researchers said.

Developmental screenings performed at 12, 18 and 24 months found no significantly increased risk of delay in children exposed to COVID in the womb, researchers found.

For example, at 12 months of age about 32% of children exposed to COVID had abnormal screening results, compared with 29% of unexposed children.

By 24 months, the percentages were the same -- about 17%, whether or not a child had been exposed to COVID during pregnancy.

Follow-up analyses focusing on different factors that might increase risk -- the trimester of infection, whether there was fever during pregnancy, infection occurring before or after vaccination -- also found no differences in developmental delay.

However, an editorial accompanying the study warned it might be too soon to say for certain these children won’t suffer any developmental delays.

Editorial author Dr. Andrea Edlow noted that the screening tool used by the researchers is not 100% accurate, and that other studies have linked exposure to infectious disease during pregnancy with increased risk to a child’s development.

“In the context of complementary studies and larger studies that suggest different conclusions, the most honest answer is the best one: we do not yet know,” concluded Edlow, who is vice chair of research in obstetrics and gynecology with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on COVID during pregnancy.

SOURCE: American Psychiatric Association, news release