Women who were pregnant at the time of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of witnessing the disaster passed on their stress effects to their newborns. At one year of age these infants had abnormal levels of the stress hormone cortisol. We might wonder if this was not a post-natal effect of the mother’s PTSD. However, the greatest change was noted in infants whose mothers were in the last three months of pregnancy on September 11, 2001. So the fact that the stage of pregnancy a woman was at when the tragedy occurred was
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