Maternal Care Modulates the Relationship between Prenatal Risk and Hippocampal Volume in Women But Not in Men

Abstract

Smaller hippocampal volume is associated with psychiatric disorders. Variations in hippocampal volume are discussed as both a consequence of the neurotoxic effects of stress and as a pre-existing condition leading to increased vulnerability for cognitive and emotional impairments. To investigate whether early experience can account for variability in hippocampal volume in adulthood (vulnerability hypothesis), we assessed the relationship between birth weight and hippocampal volume in 44 subjects. The reported quality of maternal care in early childhood, as evaluated by the Parental Bonding Inventory, was used as index of the quality of the postnatal environment. Hippocampal volume was assessed from magnetic resonance images using a manual segmentation protocol. We show that birth weight significantly predicts hippocampal volume in adulthood only in female subjects reporting low maternal care. The results suggest that the postnatal environment modulates the neurodevelopmental consequences of prenatal risk and that this effect is sex-specific.

Mother nurture and the social definition of neurodevelopment

“…A strength of the study is the laboratorybased assessment of maternal support during mildly stressful conditions, which very nicely mimics the challenges parents regularly face in child rearing. Maternal support at neither preschool nor school age emerged as a significant predictor of hippocampal volume, a finding consistent with cross-sectional studies showing that variations in maternal influences do not necessarily emerge as main effects in studies of neurodevelopment (2,3). However, the unique, longitudinal approach of Luby et al (1) reveals a compelling association between maternal support and hippocampal growth trajectories: hippocampal volume increased faster with age among subjects with higher levels of maternal support.…”

Maternal cortisol over the course of pregnancy and subsequent child amygdala and hippocampus volumes and affective problems

“…Thus, it is likely that, for any given individual, the risk of developing specific psychopathologic conditions in the context of elevated prenatal cortisol exposure may be influenced by additional factors such as genetic vulnerability, epigenetic alterations, and other environmental exposures (60,80). However, we emphasize that the effects of maternal cortisol in pregnancy on child amygdala volume and affective function persisted after controlling for maternal depressive symptoms at the time of assessment of child outcomes.…”

“…The fact that a similar concentration of cortisol is associated with different consequences in boys and girls suggests a sex-specific programming effect, i.e., the same environmental cue is not associated with the same outcome in boys and girls. There are several examples in the animal and human literature to suggest many prenatal insults produce outcome-specific sexually dimorphic developmental consequences (33,60,(62)(63)(64). Mechanisms that have been discussed in this context include the presence of sex-specific placental adaptation to stress exposure (65) and the notion of increased susceptibility of the female brain to its milieu given the more rapid neurodevelopmental trajectory in females compared with males (66,67).…”

Patch-based segmentation using expert priors: Application to hippocampus and ventricle segmentation

“…The HC plays an important role in human memory and orientation. Moreover, HC dysfunction is involved in a variety of diseases, including AD (Jack et al, 2000), posttraumatic stress disorder (Bremner et al, 1995), major depression (Bremner et al, 2000), schizophrenia (Buss et al, 2007;Tanskanen et al, 2005), and epilepsy (Bernasconi et al, 2003). This structure is especially difficult to segment because of its small size, high variability, low contrast, and discontinuous boundaries in MR images (Chupin et al, 2007;Siadat et al, 2007).…”