Measuring the Time-Scale-Dependent Information Flow Between Maternal and Fetal Heartbeats During the Third Trimester: Impact of Fetal Sex and Maternal Chronic Stress
Nicolas B. Garnier, Maria S. Molinet, Marta C. Antonelli, Silvia M. Lobmaier, Martin G. Frasch · 2026
Read Measuring the Time-Scale-Dependent Information Flow Between Maternal and Fetal Heartbeats During the Third Trimester: Impact of Fetal Sex and Maternal Chronic Stress by Nicolas B. Garnier, Maria S. Molinet, Marta C. Antonelli, Silvia M. Lobmaier, Martin G. Frasch (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13203766.txt.
Description
Nicolas Garnier, Maria Molinet, and Marta Antonelli lead a team measuring how information flows between a mother's heartbeat and her fetus's in late pregnancy. Their study appeared in two thousand twenty-six. Maternal stress is known to alter the coupling of the two rhythms. The team asked what mechanism carries that coupling.
They recorded over a hundred third-trimester pregnancies, half under chronic stress. Information measures were computed at short and longer time scales. One coupling mode ignored stress: maternal slowdowns steadied fetal rhythm complexity. A second mode, directional information transfer, did respond to stress and hormone levels. That transfer also showed a sex-by-stress pattern, present in female fetuses only. Both hearts favored speeding over slowing, fetuses most of all. The findings split coupling into a conserved core and a stress-sensitive channel.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nicolas B. Garnier, Maria S. Molinet, Marta C. Antonelli, Silvia M. Lobmaier, Martin G. Frasch |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 86 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |