Children who have developed any kind of ‘Neuro-Developmental Abnormalities (NDA)’ in the womb leading to brain’s disability to grow normally are more prone to fall into some sort of addiction in their later lives. During the first three months of pregnancy which are vital to the normal growth of a child’s brain, if the mother is exposed to starvation and hunger, it has an unfavorable impact on the mental health of the offspring which he carries forward in his adult life too, showing more vulnerability towards addictive behavior.

Pregnancy

This has been brought to light by the researchers, from the “Dutch Mental Health Care Organization”, ‘Bouman GGZ’, and ‘Erasmus University’, Rotterdam ,during one of their studies, who studied men and women born in Rotterdam between 1944 and 1947, the time of the Dutch ‘hunger winter‘.

They could observe a startling relation between the adults who had been receiving treatment for their addictive disorders and the history of their mothers who encountered severe food shortages and starvation during their early pregnancy.

The ‘hunger winter’ which lasted from mid-October 1944 until 12 May 1945 was the result of a blockade imposed by the Nazi occupation, in which the Germans restricted the transport of food over inland waterways to the western part of the country, where such large cities as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague are located.

The situation became frantic when the stock of foodstuffs stored during the early phase of the war exhausted. Pregnant and nursing mothers were entitled to the supplementary rations but it also could not sustain for a long time, resulting in death of 22,000 people in the Netherlands during this famine.

The offspring born to the mothers who suffered long phases of starvation and hunger developed large range of chronic disorders in their later lives. In addition to physical ailments like coronary heart disease, they also showed large cases of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and clinical depression.

The exposure to famine beyond the three months of pregnancy did not show any higher range of malfunctioning of the brain leading to addictive behavior which clearly indicates that the first trimester of pregnancy is critical to the development of the brain.

Ernst Franzek, the lead author of the study, further comments that the research findings indicate about the negative, harmful and adverse influence of maternal malnutrition on the mental health of the adult offspring. This situation creates good enough reasons that have prime concerns” about the possible future consequences for the hunger regions in our world“, according to Ernst Franzek.

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