Poor maternal sleep quality during pregnancy may act as a prenatal
stress factor for the fetus and associate with neonate neurocognition,
for example via fetal programming. The impacts of worsened maternal
sleep on neonatal development and, more specifically on neonatal
auditory brain responses, have not been studied. A total of 155
mother-neonate dyads drawn from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study
participated in our study including maternal self-report questionnaires
on sleep at gestational week 24 and an event-related potential (ERP)
measurement among 1-2-day-old neonates. For sleep quality assessment,
the Basic Nordic Sleep Questionnaire (BNSQ) was used and calculated
scores for (1) insomnia, (2) subjective sleep loss and (3) sleepiness
were formed and applied in the analyses. In the auditory ERP protocol,
three emotionally uttered pseudo words (in happy, angry and sad
valence) were presented among neutrally uttered pseudo words. To study
the relations between prenatal maternal sleep quality and auditory
emotion-related ERP responses, mixed-effects regression models were
computed for early (100–200 ms) and late (300–500 ms) ERP response
time-windows. All of the selected BNSQ scores were associated with
neonatal ERP responses for happy and angry emotion stimuli (sleep loss and sleepiness in the early, and insomnia, sleep loss and sleepiness in the late time-window). For sad
stimuli, only maternal sleep loss predicted the neonatal ERP response
in the late time-window, likely because the overall ERP was weakest in
the sad condition. We conclude that maternal sleep quality during
pregnancy is associated with changes in neonatal auditory ERP
responses.