Norwegian researchers have reported that children whose mothers are likely to produce too little of the brain chemical serotonin because if genetic mutations may be at a much higher risk.

Serotonin plays a part in many physiological functions and plays an important role during the development especially in the development of nerve cells as per the researchers.

Lead researcher Dr. Jan Haavik, from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Bergen said, “An impaired maternal serotonin production may have profound long-term behavioral effects on [offspring], independent of the children's own genotypes.”

He added, “As technologies evolve, systematic gene sequencing can provide new insight into mechanisms of complex disorders like ADHD.”

The report is published in the October issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

“The clinical outcome probably depends on a sum of many different genetic or environmental factors in addition to variations in maternal serotonin levels,” the Norwegian researchers noted.

They also laid stress on the fact that further studies replicating the results preferably in larger samples will be needed to corroborate this relationship.