Hurricane Sandy May Have Altered Unborn Babies’ Brains

By the time Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. East Coast in October 2012, it had already carved a path of destruction through the Caribbean. When it was done, it had left behind over 250 dead and billions of dollars in damage.

A new study suggests that the storm’s impact actually went deeper than that, leaving a psychological scar on the brains of unborn babies still in the womb along the hurricane’s path.

Pushing their findings in PLOS One, A team of researchers led by neuropsychologist Donato Delngeniis at Queens College wanted to know what happens when unborn children are exposed to overlapping climate disasters, like the extreme heat and stresses caused by a major storm like Hurricane Sandy. They found that the climate crisis might be messing with the structure of a fetus’s brain.

The team scanned the brains of 34 NYC-born eight-year-olds. Eleven of these kids were in utero when Sandy hit, knocking out power, flooding homes, and turning entire neighborhoods into disaster zones. The rest were prenatal, either before or after the storm.

Hurricane Sandy May Have Rewired Some Babies’ Brains While They Were In The Womb

The unborn kids that were in the womb when Sandy hit showed significantly enlarged regions of the brain that help regulate emotion, help developing kids learn how to move, and deal with habit formation.

They also found that if the fetus experienced extreme heat, as defined by days hotter than 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the effects of exposure to Hurricane Sandy were amplified. This led to a double whammy of kids having a larger left palladium and a smaller left nucleus accumbens, parts of the brain tied to motivation and action.

The hurricane didn’t just affect the physical world; it might have impacted the still-developing brains of unborn children.

The study had a small sample size and only focused on larger-scale brain structures, so there’s plenty of room for other research teams to conduct their studies to either verify or dispel some of this study’s findings. But this study’s findings are concerning, especially considering how increased global temperatures, thanks to climate change, will undoubtedly create bigger, nastier, more unpredictable hurricanes.

This means that the climate crisis is more than just rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and encroaching shorelines that threaten rich people’s real estate values. It could be preloading behavioral and neurological challenges into humans before they’re even born.