Impact of Gestational Maternal SARS‐CoV‐2 Infection on Neonatal Inflammatory Biomarkers

PROBLEM: Since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of pregnant women have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, eliciting concerns about maternal and fetal sequelae. Yet, the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the child's immune response remains largely unexplored. METHOD OF STUDY: Herein, we leverage 833 mother-infant dyads from a New York City-based pregnancy cohort to explore prospective associations between maternal gestational SARS-CoV-2 infection and inflammatory biomarkers in newborns. Of the mothers, 100 were infected with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy, as confirmed through self-report, antibody and/or PCR test results. We obtained 92 inflammatory biomarker levels in neonatal dried blood spots (DBS) using the Olink Target 96 Inflammation panel. An empirical Bayes method was used to fit linear regression models to assess the effects of maternal infection during pregnancy on neonatal inflammatory markers at birth. We also conducted stratified analyses by timing of infection in early (