Prenatal exposures and infant brain: Review of magnetic resonance imaging studies and a population description analysis

Abstract

Brain development is most rapid during the fetal period and the first years of life. This process can be affected by many in utero factors, such as chemical exposures and maternal health characteristics. The goal of this review is twofold: to review the most recent findings on the effects of these prenatal factors on the developing brain and to qualitatively assess how those factors were generally reported in studies on infants up to 2 years of age. To capture the latest findings in the field, we searched articles from PubMed 2012 onward with search terms referring to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), brain development, and infancy. We identified 19 MRI studies focusing on the effects of prenatal environment and summarized them to highlight the recent advances in the field. We assessed population descriptions in a representative sample of 67 studies and conclude that prenatal factors that have been shown to affect brain metrics are not generally reported comprehensively. Based on our findings, we propose some improvements for population descriptions to account for plausible confounders and in time enable reliable meta‐analyses to be performed. This could help the pediatric neuroimaging field move toward more reliable identification of biomarkers for developmental outcomes and to better decipher the nuances of normal and abnormal brain development.

Maternal Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Is Associated With Sexually Dimorphic Alterations in Amygdala Volume in 4-Year-Old Children

“…Obstetric data was retrieved from the Finnish Medical Birth Register of the National Institute for Health and Welfare 2 , and included gestational complications (diabetes: N = 6, hypertension: N = 1) and maternal prepregnancy body mass index (BMI). We dichotomized BMI (BMI < 25, BMI > = 25) given that maternal obesity has been associated with alterations in the infant brain (Pulli et al, 2018). We further dichotomized medication use (thyroxine and corticosteroids; yes/no), alcohol and/or nicotine exposure (yes/no), gestational complications (yes/no) and previous miscarriages and/or abortions (yes/no).…”

Newborn white matter microstructure moderates the association between maternal postpartum depressive symptoms and infant negative reactivity

“…Maternal depressive symptoms at 3 and 6 months postpartum were used as continuous variables in the main analysis. Further, an averaged sum of depressive symptoms throughout pregnancy was calculated to be used as a covariate in the analyses, as based on previous studies, prenatal distress could independently affect child brain ( Scheinost et al., 2017 ; Pulli et al., 2018 ).…”

“…The following covariates were included based on the previous literature on factors that may affect child brain and/or negative affect: infant sex (e.g. Else-Quest et al., 2006 ), parity ( Fish and Stifter, 1993 ), maternal alcohol/tobacco use during pregnancy (see a review in Pulli et al., 2018 ) and maternal prenatal depressive symptoms (e.g. Dean et al., 2018 ) and post-conceptional age, resulting in the following models:…”

A systematic review of MRI studies of language development from birth to 2 years of age

“…Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has given new possibilities for studying human brain development during its most dynamic phases of growth and developmental changes–from infancy to early adulthood. This is highlighted in recent studies supporting that many factors alter infant brain development even before birth (Choe et al., 2013; Knickmeyer et al, 2008; Pulli et al., 2019; Qiu et al., 2013). To this day, electroencephalography (EEG) has been a very popular method for observing cognitive and language‐related neural development, and this functional field of study has collected a great amount of information about early brain maturation (Brito et al., 2016; Gaudet et al., 2020).…”