“Detecting, Understanding, and Preventing Neuroinflammation” press conference at SfNJEF AKSTIn a longitudinal study of mothers and their newborn babies, Claudia Buss of the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues have found that increased production of the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) in a woman can lead to alterations in the brain connectivity of her offspring. Meanwhile, researchers at Duke University have uncovered evidence in mice that maternal diet, which is linked to inflammation, can cause inflammatory and behavior changes in offspring.
Buss and her colleagues measured levels of IL-6 in maternal blood samples taken early in pregnancy, in the middle, and near the end, then performed MRI scans of the newborns shortly after birth. “This is the only way that we will be able to understand prenatal influences that are not confounded by post-natal influences,” Buss said today (November 17) at a press conference at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting in Washington, DC. Specifically, the team looked for patterns of synchronized activity in the default mode network (DMN), dysfunction of which has been linked to psychiatric disorders.
The group found that the infant DMN “doesn’t look like adult network, but it’s emerging,” Buss said. “It’s there in an immature state.” More importantly, higher maternal ...
