Stabilization of blood vessels is based on a endothelial cell-pericyte interactions, which clearly plays an CT99021 citations important role in the remodelling and shaping of the retinal vasculature. This is further illustrated by the fact that hyperoxia exposure spares the larger, more mature arteries and veins that are radially projecting from the centre to the periphery. Also, in more mature animals the retinal vasculature is no longer sensitive to hyperoxia-induced vaso-obliteration. However, it is less clear to which degree retinal astrocytes and pericytes contribute to vessel stabilization and how important VEGF secretion from these cells is during the critical period of network maturation in the first 2-3 weeks after birth. We therefore investigated the role of astrocyte-derived VEGF in retinal vascular development by genetically abolishing VEGF expression using the Cre-lox system. The original neglect hypothesis found associations between neglect in school age and overweight in early adulthood, but the associations have also been seen in preschool children. It is possible that the child can adapt to some maternal distress, but associations with long-term exposure could be different. We repeated the adjusted analyses controlling for prenatal distress reported during pregnancy, but this did not change our findings. Previous studies have investigated several kinds of psychosocial stress of the child and subsequent overweight. These studies investigated neglect, child sexual abuse, posttraumatic stress and attachment-style and they found associations to either overweight or obesity. However, these studies all had follow-up in adulthood, except for one of the neglect studies. Maternal postpartum distress is only a proximal measure of the child’s exposure to psychosocial stress, which could explain our negative findings. Previous observations of associations between psychosocial stress of the child and later obesity could also be related to other determinants in or around the child. The study of posttraumatic stress by Perkonigg et al. actually did not find associations to overweight, but found associations to obesity only among females, OR 3.8. This may suggest possible differences in the dose-response relations to overweight and obesity. However, our supplementary analyses only on obese children did not support an association. Earlier cross-sectional studies found that childhood overweight and maternal distress were coexisting, and explained by stressful family interactions such as mealtime difficulties in families with overweight children or adolescents. But the causality chain between the two is unknown. Oberlander et al. suggested that the infant feeding practice or the mothers handling of the child could affect the early programming of the HPA-axis and thereby stress and appetite regulation. We found no overall interaction with breastfeeding.