Internalizing problems, which include anxiety and depressive disorders, remain among the leading contributors to the global burden of disease, and their roots often reach back into fetal life. The developing brain grows rapidly during pregnancy under the control of genes that direct how neural circuits are built and operated. MicroRNAs—tiny RNA molecules that do not code for proteins but instead regulate which genes are switched on or off—are key players in this process. Because microRNA levels can shift when a pregnant woman experiences stress, and can differ depending on whether she is carrying a male or female fetus, researchers have suspected they may serve as a molecular bridge between maternal experience and child mental health.

The new study is the first to examine microRNA levels in both prenatal maternal blood samples and placental tissue collected at delivery in relation to internalizing symptoms in preschool-aged children, while simultaneously accounting for chronic maternal stress and the biological sex of the baby. Rather than looking at microRNAs floating freely in the blood, the team focused on microRNAs packaged inside extracellular vesicles—microscopic membrane-bound particles that cells release into circulation and use to shuttle molecular cargo, including RNA, between tissues. These vesicles are thought to be a communication channel between the mother, the placenta, and the fetus, making their microRNA cargo a plausible vehicle for transmitting stress signals.

To measure children’s mental health, the researchers used the Child Behavior Checklist, a well-validated parent-report instrument, capturing total problems, internalizing problems, and diagnostic-oriented scales for anxiety and affective problems in the preschool years. On the molecular side, they profiled microRNAs in extracellular vesicles isolated from blood drawn during pregnancy and in placental tissue obtained at birth. The analysis pipeline was deliberately conservative. First, the team applied Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression—a machine learning technique that shrinks the coefficients of less informative variables toward zero—embedded within a stability selection procedure, which repeatedly refits the model on resampled data to identify microRNAs whose associations with child outcomes are most consistent. Only microRNAs that survived this rigorous filtering were carried forward.

Next, the researchers used multivariable linear regression to examine all of the selected microRNAs together in a single model for each behavioral outcome, allowing them to estimate each microRNA’s contribution while accounting for the others. Finally, and most importantly for the study’s central question, they stratified the associations by lifetime maternal stress measured prenatally and by fetal sex, and fit models that included a three-way interaction term combining stress, sex, and microRNA expression. This design allowed the team to test whether the same microRNA behaves differently depending on the mother’s stress history and the child’s sex, rather than assuming a uniform effect across all pregnancies.

Two molecules emerged as top candidates. In maternal blood extracellular vesicles, microRNA miR-330-5p stood out, while in placental tissue it was miR-548aw. But the most revealing findings came from the interaction analyses. When fetal sex and lifetime maternal stress were considered jointly, the association between blood miR-330-5p and affective problems—symptoms related to depression—was positive in females exposed to low stress, with a standardized effect estimate of 0.73 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.15 to 1.3. In males with high stress exposure, however, the association reversed direction, becoming negative with an estimate of -1.64 and a confidence interval of -3.01 to -0.28. The interaction p-value was 0.03, indicating that this reversal was unlikely to be due to chance alone.

A similarly striking pattern appeared for placental Let-7b, a member of the evolutionarily ancient let-7 microRNA family known to regulate developmental timing. Let-7b expression in the placenta was negatively associated with total behavioral problems among males whose mothers reported high lifetime stress, with an estimate of -6.58 and a confidence interval of -12.45 to -0.71, but positively associated among males whose mothers reported low stress, with an estimate of 3.63 and a confidence interval of 1.26 to 6.01. The interaction p-value was 0.04. In other words, the same placental microRNA was linked to better behavioral outcomes in high-stress pregnancies and worse outcomes in low-stress pregnancies—but only in boys, underscoring how tightly fetal sex and maternal context are intertwined in shaping these molecular signals.

To understand what these microRNAs might actually be doing, the team performed pathway enrichment analysis, which maps genes targeted by a microRNA onto known biological networks. The top pathways implicated were Hippo, FoxO, and PI3K/mTOR signaling. These are not obscure players. The Hippo pathway governs organ size and cell proliferation, the FoxO family of transcription factors regulates stress resistance and cellular survival, and PI3K/mTOR signaling controls cell growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis. All three have documented roles in neurodevelopment, suggesting plausible mechanistic routes by which altered microRNA signaling during pregnancy could influence how the fetal brain is wired and, ultimately, how children regulate emotions and behavior years later.

The authors emphasize that the findings point toward novel directions for future research aimed at unraveling the mechanistic underpinnings of how maternal stress and fetal sex jointly shape the developmental origins of common mental health trajectories such as anxiety and depression. Because the study is observational, it cannot prove that microRNA changes cause later internalizing problems; the associations could reflect confounding by other factors, and the effect sizes, while statistically significant, come from a modest sample. Still, the sex-specific reversals are difficult to dismiss as noise, and they align with a growing body of evidence that prenatal stress operates differently in male and female fetuses, possibly through placental adaptations that differ by sex.

If the findings hold up in larger and more diverse cohorts, they could reshape early prevention. Identifying children at risk for anxiety and depression as early in life as possible would allow interventions to be applied when the developing brain is most malleable, with significant implications for preventing mental health problems across the lifespan. MicroRNAs in circulating extracellular vesicles are particularly attractive as biomarkers because they can be measured from a simple maternal blood sample during pregnancy, potentially offering a minimally invasive window into fetal neurodevelopment. For now, the study stands as a vivid demonstration that the biology of childhood mental health begins long before childhood—and that the messages carried between mother, placenta, and fetus are written in a molecular language that scientists are only beginning to translate.

Subject of Research: Prenatal microRNA signaling in maternal blood extracellular vesicles and placenta in relation to children's internalizing problems

Article Title: Lifetime maternal stress, fetal sex, and microRNAs in prenatal extracellular vesicles and placenta in relation to children’s internalizing problems

Article References: Wright, R. J., Saddiki, H., Dominguez, R., Wu, H., Cowell, W., Wright, R. O., Baccarelli, A. A., & Colicino, E. (2026). Lifetime maternal stress, fetal sex, and microRNAs in prenatal extracellular vesicles and placenta in relation to children’s internalizing problems. Biology of Sex Differences. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-026-00996-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13293-026-00996-5

Keywords: microRNAs, extracellular vesicles, placenta, prenatal stress, fetal sex, internalizing problems, Child Behavior Checklist, miR-330-5p, Let-7b, anxiety, depression, neurodevelopment

Parental psychological control is a specific and well-studied parenting style, distinct from ordinary discipline or oversight. It refers to attempts to shape a child’s inner world: guilt induction, conditional approval, love withdrawal, shaming, and intrusive interference with the child’s thoughts and feelings. Decades of research have linked it to internalizing problems, the family of conditions that includes depression, anxiety, and stress-related distress, which turn inward rather than erupting outward in aggression or defiance. What has been less clear is the mechanism, the invisible chain that carries the effect of a controlling household into the dormitories and lecture halls of early adulthood, and the conditions under which that chain tightens or loosens.

The new study addresses that gap with a moderated mediation model, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test both an indirect pathway and the boundary conditions that modify it. The participants, 56.53 percent of whom were male, averaged 20.28 years of age with a standard deviation of 1.09, placing them squarely in the developmental window of emerging adulthood. Each completed validated questionnaires measuring perceived parental psychological control, interpersonal sensitivity, upward social comparison on social media, and the three core dimensions of internalizing problems: stress, anxiety, and depression. The study received ethical approval from the School of Psychology at South China Normal University and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The first finding confirmed the expected baseline: parental psychological control was positively associated with all three dimensions of internalizing problems. Students who reported more controlling parenting reported more stress, more anxiety, and more depressive symptoms. But the model’s real contribution lies in what it found between those endpoints. Interpersonal sensitivity, the tendency to feel easily hurt, self-conscious, and anxious about criticism and social evaluation, accounted for a significant indirect association between parental psychological control and each dimension of internalizing distress. In other words, part of the reason controlling parenting predicts emotional suffering in college is that it appears to cultivate a heightened vulnerability to the judgments of others.

This mediating role makes developmental sense. Children raised under psychological control often learn that love and approval are conditional, that their feelings may be dismissed or weaponized against them, and that scrutiny is constant. Such an environment can train a young person to monitor social cues with anxious intensity, to read criticism into neutral interactions, and to treat interpersonal evaluation as a threat. When those individuals arrive at university, a setting dense with social comparison, new relationships, and evaluative pressure, that hypervigilant interpersonal style becomes a conduit through which academic and social stressors convert into anxiety, stress, and depression.

The study’s most provocative contribution, however, concerns the digital layer. The researchers measured upward social comparison on social media, the habit of comparing oneself to the seemingly superior lives, achievements, and appearances displayed in other people’s posts. This variable did not behave uniformly across the model. Instead, it moderated, or changed the strength of, several different links in the causal chain, sometimes in opposing directions, a pattern the authors describe as offering targeted intervention ideas for college mental health education in the digital media era.

Specifically, upward social comparison on social media negatively moderated the association between parental psychological control and interpersonal sensitivity, as well as the direct associations between parental psychological control and both stress and depression. In statistical terms, a negative moderation means that as upward comparison increased, the strength of these associations decreased. Students who engaged heavily in upward comparison showed a somewhat weaker link between controlling parenting and interpersonal sensitivity, and a weaker direct link between controlling parenting and their stress and depression levels. The authors do not claim that social comparison is protective in any simple sense; rather, the pattern suggests that the pathway from parenting to distress is not fixed, and that individual differences in social media behavior are entangled with how early family experiences translate into adult symptoms.

Yet the same variable acted in the opposite direction at a different junction. Upward social comparison on social media positively moderated the association between interpersonal sensitivity and stress. For students already high in interpersonal sensitivity, more frequent upward comparison was associated with a stronger connection between that sensitivity and their stress levels. This asymmetry is the study’s most striking technical result: the same behavior weakens some links in the chain while strengthening another. It suggests that social comparison is not a single lever with a single effect but a context-dependent process whose consequences depend on where in the psychological pathway a person stands.

For the growing audience of readers who follow psychology research online, the findings land at the intersection of two viral conversations: the long shadow of controlling parenting and the mental health costs of social media. The study resists a simplistic verdict on either. It does not say that social media is uniformly harmful or that it repairs the damage of difficult childhoods. Instead, it shows that the digital and familial environments interact, and that understanding a student’s distress requires looking both backward at the parenting they received and forward at the feeds they consume. The authors argue that their findings provide targeted intervention ideas, implying that mental health programs for college students might be more effective if they address interpersonal sensitivity and social comparison habits alongside family history rather than treating each factor in isolation.

Several caveats frame the work appropriately. The data are cross-sectional, collected through a single questionnaire survey, which means the model describes statistical associations rather than proven causal sequences; longitudinal and experimental designs would be needed to confirm the direction of the pathways. The sample was drawn from Chinese universities, and parenting norms and social media cultures vary across societies, so generalization requires care. All measures were self-reported, leaving room for shared-method bias. The authors declare no competing interests and received no external funding for the study. Even with these limitations, the research adds a technically sophisticated piece to the puzzle of emerging adult mental health, showing that the road from a controlling household to anxiety and depression runs through interpersonal sensitivity, and that the traffic on that road is partly governed by how young people compare themselves to the curated lives glowing on their screens.

Subject of Research: The association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students, mediated by interpersonal sensitivity and moderated by upward social comparison on social media

Article Title: A moderated mediation model of the association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students

Article References: Li, W., Meng, J., & Liu, Y. (2026). A moderated mediation model of the association between parental psychological control and internalizing problems among college students. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-75982-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-75982-3

Keywords: parental psychological control, internalizing problems, interpersonal sensitivity, upward social comparison, social media, college students, depression, anxiety, stress, moderated mediation, mental health, emerging adulthood

The research team, led by Varsha Singh with colleagues Harish Chaudhury and Mahim Sagar, set out to fill a conspicuous gap in the scientific literature. Most of what psychologists know about adolescent mental health comes from Western, industrialized nations, yet the majority of the world’s adolescents live elsewhere, often in societies with very different family structures, gender norms, and resource constraints. In developing countries with patriarchal traditions, early gender inequity can shape everything from nutrition to freedom of movement, potentially leaving distinct fingerprints on physical health, family life, and the social worlds teenagers inhabit. Whether the well-established Western patterns of sex differences in psychological problems hold in such contexts was, until now, an open question.

To answer it, the researchers administered the Indian Adolescent Health Questionnaire alongside the widely used Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire to 5,121 students. The sample was 48 percent male and 39 percent female, with 13 percent of respondents not reporting sex. The health questionnaire captured physical health, nutrition, hygiene, safety attitudes, substance use, academics, and perceptions of family and school environments, while the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire measured adjustment problems along two broad axes: internalizing difficulties, which turn distress inward as emotional symptoms, peer problems, and withdrawal, and externalizing difficulties, which turn it outward as conduct problems, hyperactivity, and risk-taking.

The physical health results alone reveal how early and how differently gender inequity can register in the body. Male adolescents reported better overall physical health and better nutrition than their female classmates. Female adolescents, by contrast, reported more favorable attitudes toward safety, substance use, and academics. In a society where girls may eat last, move less, and enjoy less autonomy, the researchers argue, these divergences are not trivial quirks of self-report but early markers of a gender gap in health that can widen across the lifespan. Notably, the sexes did not differ on every dimension: hygiene attitudes and perceptions of the family environment were statistically indistinguishable between boys and girls, suggesting that some foundations of adolescent wellbeing are shared even where risks diverge.

Correlation analyses confirmed that the domains of adolescent life do not operate in isolation. Physical health, family environment, school environment, and broader social environment were all significantly intercorrelated, with correlations reaching significance at p = .00. In other words, a teenager who is physically run down is more likely to be embedded in strained family or school contexts, and vice versa. Independent-samples t-tests showed significant sex differences in nearly every subdomain measured, with hygiene and family environment the only exceptions. This dense web of associations underscores a central premise of the study: adolescent maladjustment cannot be understood as a purely psychological phenomenon detached from the body, the household, and the classroom.

The scale of psychological difficulty the survey uncovered is sobering. Using standard cutoffs on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, the researchers found that 22.8 percent of the school students fell into the borderline range for adjustment problems, while 16 percent were categorized as highly problematic—roughly one in six adolescents showing clinically concerning levels of difficulty. Contrary to the pattern often reported in Western samples, where girls predominate in internalizing problems and boys in externalizing ones, this study found no significant sex difference in internalizing problems. Boys and girls were equally likely to report emotional symptoms and peer difficulties. Externalizing problems, however, did show the expected male skew, with boys displaying higher overall maladjustment and more outward-directed difficulties.

One of the most intriguing findings concerns what drives boys’ internalizing distress. In Western literature, girls’ emotional problems are typically attributed to relational and internal pressures, while boys’ difficulties are framed as behavioral. Here, the researchers found that male students’ internalizing problems were linked specifically to their peer relationships. This suggests that in the Indian school context, boys’ emotional lives may be more vulnerable to peer dynamics than conventional frameworks anticipate—a finding with direct implications for how anti-bullying programs, friendship interventions, and school counseling are designed. If peer problems are the gateway to boys’ emotional distress, interventions targeting peer culture may pay dividends in both internalizing and externalizing outcomes.

The study also quantified the protective role of family with unusual precision. Using partial correlations that statistically controlled for both sex and grade level, the researchers found that family support was negatively correlated with emotional problems (r = -.05, p < .05), meaning that adolescents reporting stronger family support reported fewer emotional difficulties even after accounting for demographic differences. Interestingly, hygiene attitude showed a small positive correlation with hyperactivity problems (r = .033, p < .05), a counterintuitive association the authors note as a target for further investigation. The effect sizes are modest, as is typical in large correlational studies, but the direction of the family finding is consistent with a broad literature: the household remains a critical buffer against the development of emotional disorders during adolescence.

The practical implications the authors draw are twofold. First, school-based interventions that actively involve families may shield adolescents from mental health problems, leveraging the demonstrated protective association between family support and emotional wellbeing. Second, prevention efforts should be sex-specific in their targets: nutrition and physical activity for girls, whose physical health and dietary status lag behind boys’ in this sample, and drug awareness and safety for boys, whose externalizing risks and substance-related attitudes are more concerning. Rather than a one-size-fits-all mental health curriculum, the data argue for calibrated programs that address the distinct risk profiles each sex carries into adolescence in this cultural context.

The researchers are careful to frame their work as a foundation rather than a final word. They call for the use of standardized health measures that would allow longitudinal follow-up, enabling researchers to track how the health gender gap evolves across developmental phases from adolescence into adulthood. They also emphasize the need to account for the urban-rural divide that accentuates health disparities in developing countries, and for samples that reflect the diversity of national populations. With nearly four in ten adolescents in their own sample showing borderline or clinically significant difficulties, the stakes of that research agenda are clear. Adolescence, the study reminds us, is not merely a turbulent phase to be survived; it is the period in which the biological, psychological, and social foundations of adult health are poured—and in India’s classrooms, those foundations are being laid unevenly along lines of sex, family, and circumstance.

Subject of Research: Sex-specific associations between physical health, social support, and mental health maladjustment among school-going adolescents in India

Article Title: Association between physical and mental health in school-going adolescents: Sex-specific patterns of maladjustment in formative years of life

Article References: Singh, V., Chaudhury, H., & Sagar, M. (2026). Association between physical and mental health in school-going adolescents: Sex-specific patterns of maladjustment in formative years of life. PLOS Mental Health, 3(9), e0000708. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000708

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000708

Keywords: adolescent mental health, internalizing problems, externalizing problems, sex differences, physical health, family support, school environment, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, India, gender inequity, nutrition, peer problems

The research team, led by Tong Gong and Yi Lu of Karolinska Institutet, drew on the Child and Adolescent Twin Study in Sweden, a national cohort that has tracked participants at ages 9, 15, 18 and 24. Because the cohort was linked to national patient registers and prescription drug records, the researchers could examine not only self-reported symptoms of depression and anxiety but also clinically diagnosed disorders and antidepressant dispensing over follow-up periods extending more than a decade. This combination of symptom scales and hard clinical endpoints is rare in screen time research, which has often relied on small samples and coarse self-reports.

The headline results were striking at the population level. At ages 15 and 18, screen time showed a clear dose-response pattern with internalizing symptoms: the more hours per day young people spent on screens, the higher their depression and anxiety scores. Comparing heavy users, defined as those spending more than six hours per day, with restrictive users at two hours or less, the standardized differences in symptom scores ranged from 0.20 to 0.38 in the full sample. The associations were markedly stronger in girls than in boys for interactive activities such as gaming, chatting and browsing, with heavy use corresponding to symptom elevations of 0.37 to 0.51 standard deviations in girls, compared with 0.19 to 0.22 in boys.

The clinical picture was even more dramatic. Heavy interactive screen use at age 15 was associated with a roughly two- to threefold increased risk of being diagnosed with a depressive or anxiety disorder by age 28, with weekday heavy use showing an adjusted hazard ratio of 3.37. Even daily gaming at age 9, reported by parents, was linked to a 38 percent higher risk of clinical outcomes through age 22. Passive activities such as watching television, videos and DVDs showed far weaker and mostly non-significant associations, suggesting that what young people do on screens may matter as much as how long they spend there.

But the study’s most consequential findings emerged when the researchers turned to the twin structure of their data. Monozygotic twins share essentially all of their inherited genes, while dizygotic twins share on average half, and both types share their rearing environment. By comparing one twin who used screens heavily with their co-twin who did not, the co-twin control design effectively removes confounding from shared genetics and family background, factors that ordinary observational studies cannot measure. If the screen-mental health link were purely causal, it should persist within identical twin pairs.

It did not, at least not robustly. Within discordant dizygotic pairs, effect estimates attenuated modestly. Within discordant monozygotic pairs, the attenuation was far more pronounced: at age 15, estimates shrank by 32 to 95 percent relative to the full sample and were no longer statistically significant after correction for multiple testing. At age 18, the corresponding estimates were attenuated by 16 to 45 percent. In the longitudinal analyses, the strong cross-age associations between heavy interactive use at 15 and symptoms at 18, and between use at 18 and symptoms at 24, were reduced by roughly 30 to 60 percent within twin pairs and fell below the significance threshold. The pattern of progressive but incomplete attenuation is consistent with a mixture of genetic confounding, shared environmental confounding and possibly a small residual direct effect.

The clinical outcomes told a similar story. The threefold risk elevation associated with heavy weekday interactive use at age 15 dropped by 57 to 59 percent within discordant twin pairs, leaving a point estimate of a 65 percent increased risk that no longer reached significance after multiple-testing correction. Daily gaming at age 9, which showed a significant hazard ratio of 1.38 in the full sample, showed no comparable association within discordant pairs. The authors interpret this cautiously: the analyses had limited statistical power because informative discordant pairs are few, so small direct effects cannot be ruled out entirely, but the evidence for a clear causal effect of screen time on internalizing problems is weak.

The study also probed directionality, a persistent puzzle in this field. Screen use at age 9 did not predict symptoms at 15, but heavy interactive use at 15 and 18 predicted symptoms at 18 and 24 respectively. Intriguingly, the reverse pathway also appeared: adolescents with higher depressive and anxiety symptoms at 15 showed a small but measurable increase in interactive screen use at 18, with an odds ratio of 1.04 per standard deviation of symptoms. Although modest, this reverse association suggests that vulnerable young people may gravitate toward heavier digital engagement, potentially encountering more negative social comparison and mood impacts, a dynamic documented in recent studies of adolescents with mental health conditions.

The findings carry important implications for policy. Public health agencies in several countries have issued guidelines limiting recreational screen time for children and adolescents, but these rest largely on non-causal observational evidence. The new results align with earlier genetically informed work showing that screen behaviors themselves are moderately heritable, with twin-based estimates of 20 to 49 percent, and that genetic confounding accounts for a substantial share of the apparent association between media use and mental health. They also echo the influential analyses by Orben and Przybylski, who found that per-hour effects of screen use on adolescent well-being are small; the co-twin estimates here correspond to roughly 0.03 to 0.05 standard deviations of additional symptoms per extra hour of interactive use at age 18.

Yet the authors caution against dismissing the issue entirely. Within age-18 identical twin pairs, weekend heavy interactive use was still associated with 0.26 standard deviations of additional symptoms compared with restrictive use, an effect size comparable to established risk factors such as bullying victimization and childhood maltreatment, which typically fall in the 0.2 to 0.3 range. The study also has limitations: data collection began in 2004, before smartphones and social media became ubiquitous; the crude categories of interactive and passive use do not capture the complexity of modern digital life; and self-reported screen time is known to be underreported. Sensitivity analyses adjusting for physical activity and bullying victimization left the main findings essentially unchanged. The researchers conclude that heavy recreational screen use remains a legitimate public health concern, particularly during adolescence, but that shared genetic and familial factors partly explain the link to depression and anxiety, and that future research should focus on why and how different types of digital engagement affect vulnerable young people, rather than on screen time alone.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal twin study of recreational screen use and internalizing problems from preadolescence to young adulthood

Article Title: Recreational screen use and internalizing problems from preadolescence to young adulthood in a longitudinal twin cohort with co-twin comparison

Article References: Gong, T., Frans, E., Ohlis, A., Yao, S., Zhang, R., Nilsson, A., Molero, Y., Mosing, M. A., Brikell, I., Larsson, H., Lichtenstein, P., Thorell, L. B., Magnusson, P. K., Kuja-Halkola, R., & Lu, Y. (2026). Recreational screen use and internalizing problems from preadolescence to young adulthood in a longitudinal twin cohort with co-twin comparison. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02607-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02607-0

Keywords: screen time, mental health, depression, anxiety, twin study, co-twin control design, adolescence, genetic confounding, internalizing problems, gaming, Nature Human Behaviour, epidemiology

The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, analyzed data from 3,171 adolescents participating in the Tokyo Teen Cohort, a population-based longitudinal study in which 46.9 percent of participants were girls. The cohort was assessed at three time points, ages twelve, fourteen, and sixteen, allowing researchers to track how experiences unfolding in early and mid-adolescence shaped mental health outcomes later in the teenage years. At age sixteen, the disparities were stark. Girls showed a prevalence of depressive symptoms of 15.9 percent compared with 8.2 percent among boys, nearly a doubling of risk. Suicidal ideation followed a similar pattern, affecting 29.8 percent of girls versus 18.1 percent of boys, meaning nearly one in three sixteen-year-old girls in the cohort reported thoughts of ending their own life.

What distinguishes this investigation from much of the prior literature on sex differences in adolescent mental health is its method of hypothesis generation. Rather than relying solely on theory or prior statistical associations, the research team coproduced the study with young people themselves, working alongside the Bridging Divides Young Persons Advisory Group. This collaborative process, in which adolescents helped shape the conceptualization and design of the research, suggested loneliness and desire for thinness as the most plausible candidate pathways linking female sex to internalizing problems. The approach reflects a growing movement in child and adolescent mental health research toward genuine participation of young people in setting research priorities, a shift that recent commentaries in leading medical journals have argued is long overdue.

To test whether these candidate pathways actually carried a causal contribution, the researchers employed the mediational g-formula, a statistical technique from the field of causal inference that goes well beyond traditional regression-based mediation analysis. The g-formula, developed for settings with time-varying exposures and multiple mediators, allows investigators to estimate what would happen under hypothetical interventions, for example, if loneliness and desire for thinness at age fourteen were eliminated or set to the levels observed among boys. This counterfactual framing is critical because it treats the mediators not merely as correlated variables but as potential intervention targets, and it accommodates the complex web of confounders and intermediate variables that accumulate across adolescence.

The results were striking. The effect transmitted through loneliness and desire for thinness at age fourteen, relative to the total effect of female sex, was estimated at 34.7 percent for depressive symptoms at age sixteen and 46.3 percent for suicidal ideation at age sixteen. In other words, roughly a third of the sex gap in depression and nearly half of the sex gap in suicidal thoughts in this cohort could be statistically attributed to these two intermediates. The researchers visualized their hypothesized causal structure in a directed acyclic graph, adjusting for confounders measured at age twelve, including family and individual characteristics that could independently shape both the mediators and the outcomes. Analyses were conducted in R, with the parametric g-formula implemented through custom code that the team has made publicly available.

The choice of mediators is theoretically meaningful. Loneliness has emerged in recent years as one of the most robust psychological predictors of adolescent psychopathology, with prior work by members of the same team linking chronic loneliness to subsequent psychotic experiences, depression, anxiety, and diminished well-being. Girls may be disproportionately exposed to social disconnection during the middle teenage years, a period when peer relationships intensify in importance and social comparison becomes pervasive. Desire for thinness, meanwhile, taps into body image concerns that are well documented to intensify among adolescent girls, shaped by cultural ideals, weight teasing, and media exposure. Previous research has associated weight perception and weight-related mistreatment with poorer mental health among adolescents, and the present findings suggest that this internalized pressure may be a genuine engine of the depression and suicidality gap rather than a mere correlate.

The study’s framing of sex as the exposure deserves careful attention. In causal inference methodology, there has been extensive debate about whether characteristics like sex, race, or other social categories can be treated as causes of health outcomes, since they are not manipulable interventions in the conventional sense. The authors navigated this methodological terrain deliberately, situating their analysis within a tradition that interprets such disparities as reflecting the consequences of social positioning rather than immutable biology. By estimating the proportion of the total effect that flows through modifiable intermediates, the analysis implicitly asks a policy-relevant question: how much of the gap could close if the social conditions that girls face were changed? The answer, roughly 35 percent for depressive symptoms and 46 percent for suicidal ideation, suggests that a large fraction of the disparity is potentially addressable.

Several caveats temper the interpretation. The data come from a single cohort in Tokyo, and although the Tokyo Teen Cohort is one of the most comprehensive adolescent studies in the world, the generalizability of the specific proportions to other cultural contexts remains to be established. Residual and unmeasured confounding is an ever-present threat in observational mediation analyses, and the authors acknowledge the broader methodological literature on how such bias can distort causal estimates. The mediators were measured at a single age, fourteen, whereas loneliness and body image concerns fluctuate across development; earlier work from the same cohort has shown that distinct loneliness trajectories carry different risks. Moreover, the analysis identifies statistical pathways consistent with mediation, but it cannot prove that intervening on loneliness or thinness desire would fully close the gap, since other unmeasured pathways may operate in parallel.

Even with these limitations, the implications are considerable. The findings suggest that interventions targeting social connection and body image during early adolescence, before the age-fourteen window examined here, could meaningfully reduce the excess burden of internalizing problems carried by girls. Schools, clinicians, and policymakers now have evidence-based targets that emerged not from adult assumptions but from the lived insights of young people themselves. As the global mental health community confronts what researchers have called a silent crisis in girls’ mental health, this study demonstrates that the mechanisms behind the crisis are identifiable, measurable, and, crucially, modifiable. The work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the Wellcome Trust, and the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London, and its analytical code is openly shared to enable replication and extension by other research teams worldwide.

Subject of Research: Mediation of sex differences in adolescent depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation through loneliness and desire for thinness in a longitudinal cohort

Article Title: Loneliness and desire for thinness explain sex differences in adolescent internalizing problems

Article References: Narita, Z. C., Knowles, G., Sawyer, S. M., Yamasaki, S., Moreno-Agostino, D., DeVylder, J., Niimura, J., Nakajima, N., Yamaguchi, S., Hosozawa, M., Nakanishi, M., Sawai, Y., Nagaoka, D., Sasaki, R., Zhou, R., Yamane, N., Cosse, J., Stanyon, D., Goto, H., … Takada, K. (2026). Loneliness and desire for thinness explain sex differences in adolescent internalizing problems. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02578-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02578-2

Keywords: adolescent mental health, loneliness, desire for thinness, depression, suicidal ideation, sex differences, Tokyo Teen Cohort, causal mediation, mediational g-formula, internalizing problems, body image, coproduction

The scale of the gender gap in adolescent mental health has grown alarming in recent years. Across wealthy countries, girls consistently report higher rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm than boys, and surveys show that internalizing problems—conditions in which distress is turned inward rather than expressed through outward behavior—have risen steeply among girls since the early 2000s. A recent correspondence in Nature Human Behaviour by Zui Narita and colleagues described the situation as a silent crisis, highlighting the worsening trajectory of girls’ mental health worldwide. Parallel work by Margreet de Looze and colleagues, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, tracked psychological symptoms across 43 countries between 2002 and 2022 and found that the gender gap has been widening rather than closing, even as national-level gender equality has improved in many of those nations.

What makes the new study distinctive is its methodological rigor in moving beyond correlation. Rather than simply showing that girls who feel lonely or unhappy with their bodies also report more depression, the researchers employed a mediational g-formula, a sophisticated statistical framework developed by Shintaro Yamamuro and colleagues for estimating causal pathways when treatments and mediators vary over time and are measured repeatedly. The technique, originally applied to estimate how statin drugs affect cardiovascular disease through cholesterol lowering and anti-inflammatory action, allows researchers to model how an exposure—in this case, sex—acts on an outcome both directly and indirectly through intermediate variables. Mediation analysis of this kind is notoriously easy to get wrong; Narita and colleagues recently outlined the key pitfalls for psychiatric research in JAMA Psychiatry, and the new study appears designed with those cautions in mind.

The two mediators that emerged from the analysis tell a coherent story. Loneliness, the first pathway, has become one of the defining features of contemporary adolescence, and the evidence suggests it operates differently for girls than for boys. Adolescent girls who reported feeling isolated, disconnected from peers or lacking close confidants were more likely to develop depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts, and loneliness was more strongly linked to girls’ internalizing problems than to boys’. This aligns with a broader literature suggesting that girls’ social worlds, while often more intimate and relationally oriented, may also expose them to greater relational stress, social comparison and exclusion, all of which feed vulnerability when support networks fail.

The second pathway, the desire for thinness, points to the persistent power of body-image ideals in shaping girls’ mental health. Despite decades of public discussion about body positivity and the documented harms of unrealistic beauty standards, the aspiration to be thin remains a potent driver of psychological distress in adolescent girls. The study’s findings indicate that this desire functions not merely as a symptom of poor mental health but as a causal route through which broader cultural and social pressures are converted into depression and suicidal ideation. Boys, by contrast, are far less exposed to thinness-oriented appearance pressure in this form, which helps explain why the internalizing gap between the sexes is so pronounced during adolescence.

The study’s design strengthened its conclusions in several important ways. By incorporating repeated measures across adolescence, the mediational g-formula could account for time-varying confounding—the reality that loneliness, body dissatisfaction and depression each influence one another over time in feedback loops that simpler statistical models mishandle. By grounding the choice of mediators in adolescents’ own accounts, the researchers avoided the common trap of testing pathways that are statistically convenient but psychologically irrelevant to young people. And by focusing on two of the most robust outcomes in psychiatric epidemiology—depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation—the study tied its explanatory pathways to outcomes of clear clinical and public health significance rather than to diffuse measures of general distress.

The implications of the findings extend well beyond academic debates about mediation. If loneliness and the desire for thinness genuinely explain a meaningful share of the sex difference in adolescent internalizing problems, then interventions targeting those two mechanisms could narrow the gap. School-based programs that build peer connection and belonging, for example, might be particularly protective for girls at risk of isolation. Efforts to counter appearance-based social comparison—including scrutiny of social media environments where filtered images and diet culture circulate—could similarly reduce one of the identified pathways. Clinicians and educators may also need to screen for loneliness and body-image concerns specifically in girls, rather than waiting for depressive symptoms to become severe before intervening.

At the same time, the researchers and commentators caution that mediation is not destiny. Explaining a disparity through two pathways does not mean those pathways are the only ones that matter, nor that modifying them will eliminate the gap. Structural factors—economic insecurity, exposure to violence, academic pressure, the digitization of social life—likely interact with loneliness and appearance concerns in ways that the current analysis cannot fully disentangle. The 43-country evidence from de Looze and colleagues suggests that even macro-level conditions such as gender equality do not straightforwardly reduce the gap, hinting that the mechanisms at work are subtle and culturally embedded. The mediational g-formula itself, while powerful, rests on assumptions about causality that can never be verified with certainty in observational data.

What the study does provide is a testable, youth-informed agenda for action. The silent crisis described by Narita and colleagues a year ago now has identifiable entry points: the social disconnection that isolates girls and the appearance ideals that devalue them. Because both pathways are potentially modifiable—through school climate, clinical screening, family communication and policy on the media environments adolescents inhabit—the findings convert a seemingly intractable sex difference into a set of concrete prevention targets. For the more than 3,000 adolescents whose data illuminated these mechanisms, and for the millions of young people they represent, that translation from description to explanation to intervention is precisely what the field has needed.

The work is also a reminder of the value of listening to adolescents themselves. The pathways investigated here were not imposed from the top down by adult assumptions about what troubles young people; they emerged from young people’s own accounts of their distress. As researchers continue to track the widening gender gap in adolescent mental health, studies that combine participatory design with rigorous causal methods of this kind offer the most promising route to interventions that actually reach the young people who need them most, before crisis becomes the first point of contact with mental health care.

Subject of Research: Mechanisms explaining sex differences in adolescent mental health, focusing on loneliness and desire for thinness as pathways to girls' higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation.

Article Title: Why girls have worse mental health than boys

Article References: Why girls have worse mental health than boys. (2026). Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02577-3 (Author names are not included in the publisher’s citation export.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02577-3

Keywords: adolescent mental health, gender differences, depression, suicidal ideation, loneliness, desire for thinness, body image, mediation analysis, internalizing problems, Nature Human Behaviour, girls, worse

The study was conducted by Aline Debener and Ann-Katrin Job using data from the German Future Family project, a prospective longitudinal study that began in 2001 with 280 families recruited from randomly selected kindergartens in Braunschweig and later expanded with 197 additional families from socially disadvantaged urban areas. The project originally tested the effectiveness of the Triple P preventive parenting program and has tracked child and family development for more than 18 years. The analyses reported in the new paper drew on the 10-year follow-up in adolescence and the 18-year follow-up in emerging adulthood, both funded by the German Research Foundation. After excluding father-child dyads and families with missing participation, the final sample comprised 224 mother-child pairs, 52 percent of them daughters, with 98 percent of the reporters being biological mothers.

To measure psychopathology, the researchers used parallel questionnaires that capture the same symptoms from two vantage points. In adolescence, children completed the Youth Self Report while mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist; in emerging adulthood, the pair became the Adult Self Report and the Adult Behavior Checklist. Each version yields scores for internalizing problems, such as anxiety and depression, and externalizing problems, such as aggression and rule-breaking, covering the previous six months. Internal consistency of the scales was high at both waves. The team also measured current psychological distress in children with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and in mothers with the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales, assessed the mother-child relationship through the Family Climate Scales, and derived family socioeconomic status from education, occupation, and income.

Agreement was operationalized as the correlation between the raw scores of the paired questionnaires. In adolescence, the correlations were moderate: r = .35 for internalizing problems and r = .40 for externalizing problems. By emerging adulthood, agreement had risen to r = .53 for internalizing and r = .50 for externalizing problems. A Steiger test confirmed that the increase for internalizing problems was statistically significant, while the change for externalizing problems was not, possibly due to limited statistical power or the greater observability of externalizing behavior, which may leave less room for consistency to vary. Notably, there were no significant differences at either time point between the levels of agreement for internalizing and externalizing problems, addressing a long-standing question about whether hidden emotional problems are harder to agree on than visible behavioral ones.

The categorical analysis of discrepancies told a complementary story. Using standardized difference scores, the researchers classified each dyad as showing agreement, a positive discrepancy in which the child reported more problems than the mother, or a negative discrepancy in which the mother reported more. Roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of dyads showed no relevant discrepancy at each wave, and discrepancies became less common over time. More than half of the dyads showed no discrepancy at either wave for either problem domain, and a shift from discrepancy to agreement occurred far more often than the reverse. Only a small minority of families maintained a stable positive or negative discrepancy across the eight-year span, and almost none flipped from one direction to the other.

The predictors of discrepancy differed sharply depending on its direction, a finding the authors emphasize as clinically important. When adolescents reported more problems than their mothers, the strongest predictor was the child’s current psychological distress: more distressed adolescents produced larger positive discrepancies, accounting for over half of the explainable variance for internalizing problems and about 70 percent for externalizing problems. Maternal distress played a smaller role. When mothers reported more problems than their children, the child’s male sex was the only significant predictor in adolescence, suggesting that mothers of sons may perceive more symptoms than their sons are willing to report, possibly because male adolescents downplay their difficulties while young women tend to show more openness about mental health.

Predicting discrepancies in emerging adulthood from adolescent variables proved possible only for negative discrepancies, where mothers reported higher symptom levels than their children. The adolescent discrepancy itself was the dominant predictor, explaining roughly 60 percent of the explainable variance, which points to a stable tendency among some mothers to overestimate their children’s problems. For externalizing problems, higher child distress in adolescence also predicted a larger negative discrepancy in adulthood, consistent with the idea that worried mothers may selectively attend to signs of trouble. For positive discrepancies in externalizing problems, the family climate mattered: less mutual affection combined with more shared leisure activities predicted larger discrepancies, with affection carrying the greatest relative weight. The authors suggest that mothers who perceive problems in their children may intervene more, generating conflict, or that children who share less affectionate relationships disclose fewer symptoms.

The study has limitations that temper interpretation. Fathers were excluded because too few participated, the sample contained few low socioeconomic status families, dropout analyses showed that families lost to follow-up had more mental health problems and greater vulnerability, and the second wave of data collection occurred largely during the COVID-19 pandemic, which elevated mental health problems in young adults. The adult questionnaires also lack German standardization, so raw and standardized scores were used without clinical cutoffs, and the item composition of the adolescent and adult questionnaires differs slightly. A post-hoc power analysis revealed statistical power ranging from insufficient to very high across models, which the authors link to the split samples required for analyzing positive and negative discrepancies separately.

Despite these caveats, the implications are substantial. The findings confirm that self-reports and maternal reports are not interchangeable at any age, yet each contributes unique information, and their convergence strengthens as children mature, possibly because young adults become better at articulating internal states and because their views gradually align with their mothers’ long-standing assessments. The authors recommend that clinicians routinely seek collateral reports beyond childhood and adolescence to sharpen diagnosis and individualize treatment, and that researchers weigh the direction of any discrepancy, the child’s current distress, the quality of the mother-child relationship, and the child’s sex when interpreting multi-informant data. They also call for studies including fathers, partners, and other informants, symptom-specific analyses, cross-cultural comparisons, and work extending beyond emerging adulthood, where the trajectory of informant agreement remains largely unexplored.

For a field that has long treated discrepant reports as statistical noise to be averaged away, this study adds to a growing consensus that disagreements between informants are signals worth reading. A mother who sees more distress in her son than he admits, or a distressed daughter who reports symptoms her mother misses, is not simply producing error; she is offering a perspective shaped by attachment, observation, and the developmental moment. As longitudinal cohorts age and multi-informant assessment becomes standard in both research and care, knowing when and why mothers and children converge, and when their divergent views carry clinical meaning, may prove as important as any single report itself.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal agreement and discrepancies between self-reported and mother-reported psychopathology from adolescence to emerging adulthood

Article Title: Agreement and Discrepancies of Self- and Mother Reported Psychopathology from Adolescence Until Emerging Adulthood: Results of a Prospective Longitudinal Study

Article References: Debener, A., & Job, A.-K. (2026). Agreement and Discrepancies of Self- and Mother Reported Psychopathology from Adolescence Until Emerging Adulthood: Results of a Prospective Longitudinal Study. Child Psychiatry &amp; Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02095-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02095-3

Keywords: informant discrepancies, cross-informant agreement, psychopathology, adolescence, emerging adulthood, longitudinal study, mother-child relationship, internalizing problems, externalizing problems, psychological distress, Child Behavior Checklist, mental health assessment

The findings arrive amid a widening scientific debate over fluoride, a substance added to community water supplies at 0.7 milligrams per litre to prevent tooth decay, yet one that occurs naturally in groundwater at levels that can vary dramatically with local geology. In rural New Hampshire, where many families rely on private, unregulated wells drilled into fluoride-bearing rock, concentrations can be far higher than in fluoridated municipal systems; roughly thirteen percent of wells in regions underlain by felsic igneous rock exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s secondary maximum contaminant level of 2.0 milligrams per litre. Against this backdrop, the research team set out to test whether prenatal fluoride exposure is linked not to intelligence, which has dominated the literature, but to the social-emotional and behavioural dimensions of child development that have received far less scrutiny.

Methodologically, the study distinguishes itself through its choice of exposure biomarker. Most previous prospective studies relied on maternal urinary fluoride, which reflects intake over only about six hours—a snapshot that can fluctuate with tea drinking, meal composition, and water consumption on a given day. Toenails, by contrast, grow slowly and integrate fluoride exposure over approximately three to six months, capturing cumulative intake from all sources: drinking water, beverages prepared with fluoridated water, seafood, tea, and the inadvertent swallowing of fluoridated dental products. Because fluoride readily crosses the placenta and penetrates the blood-brain barrier, the developing fetal brain is directly exposed, making the timing and magnitude of maternal exposure biologically consequential.

The researchers analyzed toenail clippings collected from women at roughly 28 weeks of gestation and again about five weeks after delivery, yielding estimates of fluoride exposure during early pregnancy and mid-to-late pregnancy respectively. Samples were analyzed at the Indiana University School of Dentistry using a hexamethyldisiloxane microdiffusion procedure coupled with fluoride ion-selective electrode detection, and specimens weighing less than 2.5 milligrams were excluded after validation work showed that smaller samples produce unreliable results. Household tap water collected at enrollment was analyzed with a fluoride ion-selective electrode as well. The final analytic samples comprised 358 mother-child pairs with toenail fluoride data and 381 pairs with water fluoride data, drawn from a cohort recruited between 2009 and 2013 from prenatal clinics serving women using private water systems.

Children’s behaviour was assessed at age five with the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition, Parent Rating Scale for preschoolers, a validated instrument that generates age-standardized T-scores across clinical scales such as hyperactivity, aggression, attention problems, anxiety, depression, and withdrawal, along with composite indices of externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and overall behavioural symptoms. Scores of 60 or above fall into the at-risk range. In this sample, most children scored near the normative mean, with between six and twenty-eight percent in the at-risk range depending on the scale. The analysis was preregistered, and the modeling strategy used generalized estimating equations to estimate the odds of at-risk outcomes per one microgram per gram increase in toenail fluoride, with interaction terms testing for differences by child sex and exposure window.

The headline result was statistically robust: each one microgram per gram increase in toenail fluoride reflecting early pregnancy was associated with thirty-nine percent higher odds of scoring in the at-risk range for externalizing problems, with a confidence interval running from fifteen to sixty-seven percent above baseline. The late-pregnancy estimate was similar in magnitude, at thirty percent higher odds, though its confidence interval narrowly included the null. On the individual clinical scales, early-pregnancy fluoride was linked to twenty percent higher odds of at-risk hyperactivity, and the late-pregnancy estimate of twenty-four percent approached significance. The pattern suggests that no single trimester stands out as uniquely vulnerable; rather, fluoride exposure across pregnancy appears relevant to externalizing behaviour.

The sex-specific findings added a further layer of complexity. Among girls, each one microgram per gram increase in early-pregnancy toenail fluoride was associated with thirty-seven percent higher odds of at-risk depressive symptoms, while no association appeared in boys—a statistically significant interaction. Suggestive but imprecise signals also emerged for anxiety and withdrawal in girls in relation to late-pregnancy exposure. This pattern is intriguing because prior fluoride studies, particularly those examining intelligence outcomes, have often reported stronger effects in boys. The authors note that internalizing and externalizing problems may share transdiagnostic roots, including emotion dysregulation, and that sex-specific biological responses to prenatal exposures could shape which behavioural domain is affected.

Plausible biological mechanisms are beginning to take shape in the literature. Fluoride has been implicated in disruption of the thyroid axis, a concern in pregnancy because the fetus depends entirely on maternal thyroid hormones during the first trimester, and even mild maternal thyroid dysfunction has been linked to both internalizing and externalizing problems in children. Fluoride exposure has also been shown to induce oxidative stress in animal and human studies, a pathway independently associated with behavioural problems in offspring. Low iodine status, which compromises thyroid hormone synthesis, may exacerbate fluoride’s effects, and emerging evidence suggests thyroid regulation and oxidative stress responses differ by fetal sex. None of these mechanisms is confirmed as the driver of the observed associations, but together they offer a coherent framework for future investigation.

Why did water fluoride fail to predict outcomes while toenail fluoride succeeded? The authors argue that toenails capture total intake from all dietary and product sources, whereas a single tap-water measurement reflects only one exposure pathway and ignores individual differences in consumption volume. This mismatch can produce exposure misclassification that biases associations toward the null. Median water fluoride in the sample was about 0.2 milligrams per litre—comparable to other communities with naturally occurring fluoride—but values ranged from 0.02 to 13.8 milligrams per litre, and correlations between water and toenail measures, while positive, were moderate. The authors also caution that some participants may have reduced tap-water consumption after learning their wells exceeded arsenic guidelines during the study.

The study’s limitations temper its implications. The cohort was predominantly white, college-educated, married, and relatively affluent, and relied on unregulated private wells, so the findings cannot be assumed to extend to populations drinking optimally fluoridated municipal water. Postnatal fluoride exposure was not measured, toenail growth rates vary between individuals, and only a small fraction of children scored in the at-risk range, limiting statistical power. Yet extensive sensitivity analyses—adjusting for co-occurring metals, imputing missing data, removing influential observations, and modeling outcomes continuously—left the primary conclusions intact. The authors call for longitudinal follow-up, validation of toenail fluoride reference ranges in pregnant populations, and exposome-wide approaches that jointly model fluoride alongside the many other prenatal environmental exposures that shape the developing brain.

Subject of Research: The association between prenatal fluoride exposure measured in maternal toenails and social-emotional and behavioural outcomes in preschool children.

Article Title: Long-term exposure to prenatal fluoride and social-emotional and behavioural outcomes in children in the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study

Article References: Goodman, C. V., Karagas, M. R., Peacock, J. L., Korrick, S., Flora, D., Lanphear, B., Martinez-Mier, E. A., Tamayo-Cabeza, G., Lippert, F., & Till, C. (2026). Long-term exposure to prenatal fluoride and social-emotional and behavioural outcomes in children in the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study. Environmental Advances, 25, Article 100753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envadv.2026.100753

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envadv.2026.100753

Keywords: fluoride, prenatal exposure, child behaviour, hyperactivity, New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study, toenail biomarker, drinking water, neurodevelopment, thyroid, externalizing problems, internalizing problems, private wells