Het klinkt behoorlijk voor de hand liggend, maar het is nu ook aangetoond: goede verzorging in de eerste levensjaren door de moeder zorgt voor een grotere hippocampus waardoor later kinderen en jongeren beter kunnen leren, een beter geheugen hebben en beter tegen stress kunnen. Het onderzoek van Luby et al werd gepubliceerd in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition en kan je hier gratis lezen.

De onderzoekers zien belangrijke gevolgen: “This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings. I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.”

Meer uitleg vind je hier in dit artikel van ScienceDirect.

Dit is het abstract van het onderzoek:

Early maternal support has been shown to promote specific gene expression, neurogenesis, adaptive stress responses, and larger hippocampal volumes in developing animals. In humans, a relationship between psychosocial factors in early childhood and later amygdala volumes based on prospective data has been demonstrated, providing a key link between early experience and brain development. Although much retrospective data suggests a link between early psychosocial factors and hippocampal volumes in humans, to date there has been no prospective data to inform this potentially important public health issue. In a longitudinal study of depressed and healthy preschool children who underwent neuroimaging at school age, we investigated whether early maternal support predicted later hippocampal volumes. Maternal support observed in early childhood was strongly predictive of hippocampal volume measured at school age. The positive effect of maternal support on hippocampal volumes was greater in nondepressed children. These findings provide prospective evidence in humans of the positive effect of early supportive parenting on healthy hippocampal development, a brain region key to memory and stress modulation.