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Hi, it’s Dr. Monika Buerger and Elizabeth, to here to greet you for another amazing episode of ChiroSecure’s, Look to the Children’s show. And again, um, we want to thank ChiroSecure for giving us this platform to share our message and, um, help you help more little fiddle parts around the world. So thank you very much to ChiroSecure with that said, we are here to bring you an exciting episode, um, of what you all need to know about what we’ve been through in the last 18 months. Elizabeth, how’s it been for you? Well, actually, Elizabeth wasn’t even boring when this whole crap storm started. So Elizabeth is going to bring you what she knows about what it’s like to be, um, in the fetal growth, prenatal period, and jumping into the world of chaos that we’ve, we’ve dealt our, uh, that we’ve found ourselves in.
So you’re ready to go, girlfriend. She’s ready. She’s ready. And, and if you note, please note that Elizabeth has a new wardrobe. Um, she is part of the former Partridge family tribute band. If you are too young to remember the Partridge family, you can look that one up. So we’re going to get started here. Um, and we’re going to go through some slides and again, thank you to ChiroSecure for giving us this platform. So what do we want to do? I want to take you through what we know before this pandemic and what we know with regard to, um, natural disasters and pregnancy, because this is going to lay the foundation of what we’re dealing with now. So we know from various different, um, natural disasters and challenges from the Holocaust to floods, to earthquakes to the big one is known as project ice storm.
So you see that little graphic of the frozen, uh, power lines there. Um, what they know is that they, they were able to take natural disasters as a marker of where women were in their, um, prenatal experience. First, first try second try third tribe. What they’ve consistently found is those that are in the second and third trimester, the offspring of those women pregnant during that time had more, uh, predispositions to depression, anxiety, PTSD, cognitive delays, and with the project I stormed, that’s a big one that happened in Quebec, Canada anyway. Um, but what they did was they follow those offspring. And in one particular study, they found that as far out as five and a half years later, um, these kiddos were five and a half years old. They had language and cognitive impairment delays. So we’re going to take this as a basis and lead into what we’re, what we’re seeing now in the research with the pandemic that we’ve all been experiencing.
So early on in the pandemic, they looked at moms and their stress predictors. There’s their, their stress scores. Now this was back in June of the years are all running together, 2020. Okay. So just early on in the pandemic and what they’ve found that moms pre pandemic time, we’re reporting about a 29%, um, anxiety, uh, level. Okay. Basically 29% of pregnant mamas had reported clinically, uh, associated anxiety. Whereas this is in June, which those numbers are expectantly have gone up because the longer something’s going on, the more trapped in our brain and our AR and limbic system, we get. So, um, post pandemic here was 72% of pregnant women reported, um, levels of anxiety, clinically supportive levels of anxiety and 65% ish, um, reported decrease in exercise levels. Now hold onto that thought for a minute, as we go through the rest of this, um, informational presentation.
So depression, anxiety definitely elevated in everybody, but why is it of significant importance in pregnant women? It’s because what’s the long-term implications on the offspring and that’s really why we’re here today. So let’s, um, another more recent paper came out with regards to the pandemic and mother infant bonding and breastfeeding and PTSD, much higher reports of, um, childbirth PTSD. That’s what you’ll see in the upper pink, uh, little circle right there. Um, that stands for childbirth PTSD. This has been due to the, mostly to the unknown of pregnant women. Are they going to be able to deliver with a birth partner? Um, the biggest thing that they reported with regards to PTSD in the childbirth experiencing experience during the pandemic has been failure of communication with, um, their care providers. So the care providers during their birth experience, pre-birth experience not knowing what they’re going to be allowed to do and not to do.
And during their birth experience, um, was the number one thing reported with, um, childbirth PTSD. But what we’re seeing is there’s, um, decreased mom, baby infant bonding short-term and long-term, and this is going to play out with what we’re finding in regards to neurodevelopmental consequences. Long-term on the offspring, just like what was reported in those past natural disasters and in that research paper on that project ice storm. So, and then we know breastfeeding can lead to, um, a number of immune consequences on the offspring. So let’s keep this in mind as we move forward and lay this all out for you. What we’re finding now in a recent paper. And I think one of their, their summary statements is what hit me so profoundly where they stayed that the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered children’s health landscape, the landscape of children’s health. Overall, this is huge the landscape for pregnant moms, for individuals, for children, because we’re living in a totally different economic, psychosocial, educational environment, an entirely different environment as a whole.
When you look at psychosocial stressors, essentially what those are, they’re everyday stressors that everybody experiences, okay, there are stressors that we all have, but during pregnancy there’s additional stressors that that parents to be have. And these stressors are laying the foundation, um, uh, they’re imprinting on the offspring’s brain. So with a couple of studies coming out in relation just to this, this pandemic that we’ve been dealing with, and, um, in this particular paper, they looked at a little over almost 300 children that were born, um, before January of 2019. So their prenatal experiences, their prenatal time and their first postnatal year was pre pandemic versus the other group, uh, about 118 little fiddle farts that had at least one trimester in the pandemic era. And this, in this case, it happened to be the third trimester and one year postnatally during the pandemic prices. Now, why is this important that they, this particular group happened to be prenatally in that third trimester of, um, development of fetal development, because we have found that that second and third trimester is when they’re, when mom’s pregnant, mamas are under the stress sores. Those two trimesters happen to play a profound role in longterm developmental consequences of the offspring.
And for us as chiropractors, what is really incredibly important is to realize that the end of the second and into the third trimester is the developmental window of opportunity. The developmental time, the maturation of the autonomic nervous system. That is key for us to understand that that end of the second and third trimester is when the autonomic nervous system is maturing. I E bagel tone is coming on board. The parasympathetic arm of autonomic regulation is maturing. So key takeaway is stress, or is that happen during that time, fundamentally lie down the maturation or dysmaturation of the offspring’s autonomic nervous system. So this paper goes on and what it tells us not to any surprise is that, um, these children were, um, more susceptible to having verbal motor, um, and cognitive impairment. So we’ll look at the next slide where we have this laid out is the group that was, um, in pregnant and then spent their first life postnatally during this pandemic.
This pandemic time showed a really significantly reduced verbal motor and overall cognitive performance. This was unassociated with actually having COVID with mom, dad, any baby having COVID. This was strictly from environmental stress consequences. Now, remember that last, the one slide we showed about the project I storm, they follow these little fiddle and that particular study up to five and a half years of age they’re in school already. Right? So we’re ready to seeing the consequences of what’s happened. Verbal motor and overall cognitive performance is significantly reduced. They saw this more in males with a lower socioeconomic environment. Um, and again, this was independent of having the virus. They did not. In fact, they tested for antibodies. They did not show any signs of ever having the virus. This is purely environmental consequences. Now think about that little longer, the stressor goes on the more substantial numbers we’re going to see, um, presenting to our offices with these, these development of consequences.
So I want to give you some things that you want to look for to help the train before it derails. Okay. How can we intervene in a, as early as possible, but wait, there’s more, I want to bring to you the next slide, where we talk about, um, a, a group in Portugal, Portuguese children. And this was really cool because what they did was before shutdowns happen, they took these children 114 school-aged children. The average age was seven, and they did a series of motor competency, um, tasks. And they were, they were planning to do a different kind of study, but then the pandemic hit and there was shutdown. So they use the data, they had pre pandemic pre shut down, looked at these kiddos, their comp, their motor competency scores, and then did it again after they’d been locked down. So they had 50 boys, 64 girls, um, and they showed as a consequences of lack of movement of being locked down.
What we do also know from the literature as there has been a much higher rate of sedentary lifestyle technology use video game use, all of which are, um, going to impose consequences on the developing brain. So they, they took these kiddos and they did, um, three different, um, types of motor competency skills. One was stability, how well they maneuvered laterally on a wooden platform. Could they step side to side on these wooden pegs platforms? How well they handle that? The next one under our stability, uh, sequence was could they sideways jumping over a small platform? Okay. So that was one skillset. Then their locomotion, um, basically, uh, what they call the shuttle run or a sprint. They had to go from one line to another, as fast. They could pick up a block and bring it back to the home line. They did that twice, um, standing long long-terms and then what they call a manipulative skill one where they had to throw a ball as hard as they could against the wall and, and one where they had to kick a ball as hard as they could.
And they looked at, um, basically force and speed. All right. So that pre pandemic after lockdown and what they found that they had boys showed a 13 point decrease in motor competency and all of these six skills. Well with boys, it was five out of the six. They showed a decreased competency score. The sideways jumping did not, um, tend to decrease in girls. They saw a 60 point decrease in all of these six competency scores. So what’s the big deal. Okay. So their motor skills went down, big deal. They’re low comes here, whatever decrease motor competency means, decreased brain function. The brain is sending the messages down to the body in order to have the ability to do these skills and essence, there was a, more of a disconnect, a disruption between body to brain and brain to body messaging. And that showed up in these competency scores.
So decreased mobility equally basically equals decreased brain ability, brain processing. All right. So what do we want to look at? Let’s think of, let’s take some things and, and it’s kind of let’s think this through a little bit. Um, so we’ll look at the next slide and think it through a little bit motor wise, you see in the middle, the motor ability for us to perform a motor task is really associated with prenatal stress and neuromuscular development, gross motor core trunk. That’s why this little picture of the tree right here, the tree trunk we develop, we mature from a neuromuscular standpoint from medial to lateral. We have to have good core gross control before we get my fine motor control. So the tree trunk has to mature and be stable before the leaves and the branches can be healthy. And this is going to be associated with prenatal stressors.
If we have good motor input, we have good brain food, essentially bring brought to the cerebellum and the prefrontal cortex, cool beans. I’m getting good motor, a ability that’s feeding food or information into my cerebellum and prefrontal cortex. And those areas are responsible for cognition. So it stands to reason that if mom is under a lot of stress during pregnancy, and it alters the course of motor development, neuromuscular development cognition down the road is going to be affected like we’re seeing now, the other thing is we have to have this gross motor, the tree trunk, um, and maturing and fed information and stimulated before fine motor can come on board. And that would be our verbal arm here. Verbal skills are going to be a lot of fine motor skills. If I don’t have a good tree truck, core stability before mobility, I’m not going to have good, fine motor skills, and that’s going to affect language and fine motor.
But we also have to bring into play masking here in that first year of life. It is critical that that little fiddle fart makes eye contact and sees expressions, eye mouth. That connection with mom, that bonding connection actually helps mature the prefrontal cortex, the motor part of our brain. So we’re going to see these motor sequences, this motor maturation dysfunctional, and our offspring when mom’s been stressed out and who the heck hasn’t been stressed out in the last year and a half. So it stands to reason we are seeing what we’re seeing in the studies that are coming out now. So how are we going to interplay here? How are we going to intervene? Let’s take a look. Let’s take a look at mom. First things to do for mom. Things to think about. Obviously get mom under chiropractic care, enhance her adaptability, enhanced her resiliency.
Talk about some stress management tools with mom. Okay. Expecially going to be critical in that second and third trimester. You guys huge one going to support the microbiome because the microbiome is one of the key inner sensations. And we know now paper after paper, looking at the microbiome as part of brain development on the offspring mom’s microbiome and baby’s microbiome. So get her supported there and how we do that with our diet jerk fit and not junk it, just eat real food. Try to get out of that stress mode of eating and eating junk food and processed food. So jerk, but just eat real food, support her during the enter stress responses do not big red flag right here, do not support with anything that has licorice in it. It’s going to do a negative effect on baby’s development. So just know that, okay, improve heart rate variability.
How can we do that? Well, getting her adjusted, we think helps decrease that stress load. That also exercise we showed you that that one slide showed about a report of decrease in exercise in the early phase. The pandemic, we know that maternal exercise helps increase baby’s heart rate variability, their maturation of their nervous system. Okay. So talk to them about exercise, even if it’s just walking every day, exercise like yoga, polite is meditation. That’s going to bring on board calm and a balance of the autonomic nervous system. Common Monica’s common baby equals a more mature nervous system in baby. So some very basic things to do for mom, but now let’s look at things to do with baby. What do we want to look for when baby comes in? Of course, chiropractic care, same thing, enhance their neuro adaptability. Okay. We’re going to look in a minute at some what I call brain bonding, brain building and bonding things.
Okay. And I’ll show you some pictures of those you guys. We’ve got to look at that microbiome. These babies are born being born, stressed out. They’re more collagen, more irritated. They’re not pooping. All right, look at supporting. Even if it was a vaginal birth, most microbiomes are in the tank right now, stress equals a shut down microbiome period. End of story. Can’t be an arrested digestive stress date. So stress equals a shut down microbiome. We need to look at supporting that tons of evidence and research as far as good probiotics, a multi-strain probiotics to help support brain development and the baby.
And in that enhancer vital environmental exposure, there are environmental exposure to wet. We’ll take a look here in a minute, basically enhance their sensory environment, get them engaged in the world to help build those brain pathways and their motors or sensory motor experience. So let’s take a look with some, some pictures that Elizabeth, she posed for me got to love her. So in the far left side, okay. Getting eye contact, seen mom dad’s caregivers face, and their expressions is huge for many neurological reasons that we don’t time to go into here, but just know that this is maturing their brain. So get them on eye contact. I have just a picture of here. Elizabeth was in a beanbag chair. I was helping her stay up, right, because she has a little bit trouble with core stability, but, um, get those little fiddle parts of her, uh, again on, on, uh, being bad chair.
The second middle picture, when they get a little older, um, they can be up in, in mom or dad’s sitting kind of on their, on their knees, on their lap. Give them some more, um, challenge of sitting on their own for more core stability. But again, you’re in positions that have eye to eye contact and mouth expressions. This is huge for neurological development. Have parents doing this little, these little tips and tidbits for brain development. Okay. What you don’t want to do is the far right picture masking. And breakfasting, you can’t really see my hand, my arm right there, but I’m holding a cell phone as a demonstration. I call that breakfasting moms being engaged with your little fiddle fart when you’re feeding or when you’re holding their sleep, it will, hopefully they’re awake. You want mask off, let them see your expression, be engaged with them.
Don’t be on the phone watching TV or breakfasting texting on the phone, be one-to-one and bond with a child. Bonding is brain building. It is setting up the executive functioning part of the brain for cognition, that prefrontal cortex for the life of that child. So please let’s advocate to, um, our caregivers. Moms are usually the one that going to be doing the breastfeeding. Right? Okay. Um, let’s advocate that time as a one-on-one to build that child’s brain, it is bonding, but it is brain building. It is huge. Now as little fiddle, farts gets older, some fun things to do around the house. We’ll take a look that Elizabeth posts for you, some things we did around the office yesterday. So the next slide will show that let’s get some movement and motor, okay. As they get older and, and develop that core stability again, that gross motor control before they bring on fine motor control, get them in a little, a little tub.
You can do it in a box. You can do it in a little storage tub from target or Walmart or whatever. I just threw some bean bags in there. Some fluffy bean bags that you can have mom or dad put in there, um, that the packaging popcorn, little styrofoam daily WAPs, you can put, um, rice or beans or whatever, just make sure they don’t eat it, but you can stick them in there and you can stick them in there and their diaper or new for more sensory experience. Um, and you can actually tie a string or something, poke a hole in the container and tie a string around it and move them around, pull them that creates more input to their brain, especially distibular balanced input. It creates them having to do use more core control. All right. So more motor control with movement. It gives them a sensory experience.
Um, and it’s fun. All right. So that’s a cool thing. Cheap, easy, um, easy way to, to, to engage them in their environment. This other picture is Elizabeth on a snow, on a snow sledding disc. Again, you can feel that disk with different sensory toys or whatever. I put a little, a folded way to that blanket, just so we could show how Elizabeth can come up and to tummy time there, you can poke a hole on that tie, tie string around it and bleed them around the house as well. Older kiddos and the family can do this with younger siblings, create this experience. You’re getting sensory input into the brain. You’re getting motor control challenges. You’re getting tummy time and creative ways. You’re getting it as social engagement experience. Again, these are things we can easily give as activities for parents to do in the office, um, to enhance their sensory experience, to enhance their motor development.
And when you’re doing that, you’re actually building and enhancing their ability to, to develop, to, to mature their cognitive part of their brain so that when they enter, um, preschool and kindergarten, so forth, the lack of verbal cognition motor, um, we’re going to change that tide. All right. So hopefully this will give you some good things to chew on for a while. Elizabeth, anything else you want to add? She’s back. Um, she sits so patiently with me again, both of us want to thank you for joining us. Thank you, ChiroSecure for giving us this platform. Um, and thank you for all of you out there, willing to step and, um, educate yourself so that we can enlighten it and educate the world on the, um, the amazing gift that we have to give for generations to come. So I will see you next month. Erik Kowalke will be here the first Thursday of, oh my gosh, what October? Um, and I’ll be here the third Thursday of October to wish you a Happy Halloween and until then stay safe and keeping amazing
Today’s pediatric show Look to the Children was brought to you by ChiroSecure.