Maternal Cardiovascular Health Linked to Offspring Developmental Delay

WEDNESDAY, July 1, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Better maternal cardiovascular health (CVH) is associated with lower risk of offspring developmental delay at age 4 years, according to a study published online June 23 in JAMA Network Open.

Hisashi Ohseto, M.D., Ph.D., from Tohoku University in Japan, and colleagues examined the association between maternal CVH during pregnancy, assessed using Life”s Essential 8 metrics, and developmental delay in offspring at age 4 years in a cohort study. Participants included eligible mother and offspring pairs enrolled in the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project Birth and Three-Generation Cohort Study; 8,238 of 19,160 eligible pairs were analyzed (43.0 percent).

The researchers found that 8.8, 12.1, and 16.8 percent of mothers with high, moderate, and low CVH, respectively, had offspring with developmental delay in total. Moderate and low CVH during pregnancy were associated with developmental delay in total compared with high CVH (risk ratios, 1.30 and 1.62, respectively). Higher prevalence of developmental delay was seen across all five domains (communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social skills) in association with low CVH, with personal-social domain having the largest effect size and communication domain having the lowest (risk ratios, 2.23 and 1.40, respectively).

“It is vital for us to recognize the importance of these types of findings, because it means that we really must work incredibly hard, pre-conceptually, meaning even before those women actually get pregnant, to optimize women”s heart health, so that eventually their children will be in a much better space,” Evelina Grayver, M.D., from Northwell Health in New York, said in a statement.

Abstract/Full Text