How the baby’s brain develops inside mom’s belly challenges medical understanding. Wrapping our adult medical brains around the process has been a work in progress for a very long time. Many of our insights have come from correlations discovered in epidemiologic works which link various illnesses to outcomes in children years later. We obviously can’t ethically give a mother some infection or illness to watch what happens in her offspring. We can only observe what is happening in real life and try to connect the dots. However, in experimental mouse models, some researchers have connected an immune messenger with changes in fear and anxiety behaviors in baby mice.
Prior studies such as one by Patel et al demonstrated that children with autism had a higher prevalence of moms with immune conditions. These immune conditions include common illnesses like asthma and hypothyroidism as well as less common Raynaud’s disease, psoriasis, alopecia, and rheumatoid arthritis. These immune conditions also correlated with increased emotional problems but not cognitive functioning impairments.
With these correlations, others are looking for the mechanism which connects the maternal immune conditions with their children’s neurological health. In a mouse model, researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine connected the level of a particular cytokine with both behavioral changes in baby rats and observable changes in their brains. Cytokines are immune messengers that travel in the blood stream at very low levels, so others had not suspected such low levels to have any significant impact on brain development.
In the mouse model, a cytokine named XCL1 was found to be important for placental development. It remained at a stable level during the mouse fetus’ development except for a short period of time. The researchers blocked this XCL1 and then found increased tissue damage in the placenta. Male mice birthed under these conditions also demonstrated higher anxiety behaviors. Further, they demonstrated a change in the nerve cells of the ventral hippocampus, which other research has connected to anxious behavior.
Overall, we can see that a mom’s immune system may impact on their child’s future neuropsychiatric health. This should not be surprising as medicine goes to great lengths to avoid interfering with a developing fetus by avoiding harmful medications. Any time we administer some therapy to a pregnant mom, we have to consider the effects on the second patient inside her belly. This must hold true any time we are recommending for or against an immune modulating therapy during pregnancy in whatever form it takes. Helping our patients live healthier, more abundant lives includes starting before birth by caring properly for their moms.
Original Article:
Rosa J. Chen, Anika Nabila, Judit Gal Toth, Heidi Stuhlmann, Miklos Toth. The chemokine XCL1 functions as a pregnancy hormone to program offspring innate anxiety. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 2024; 118: 178 DOI: 10.1016/j.bbi.2024.02.032
Thanks to Science Daily:
Weill Cornell Medicine. “Pregnancy cytokine levels impact fetal brain development and offspring behavior.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 April 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240426165051.htm>.
Other Citations:
Shrujna Patel, Russell C. Dale, Destanie Rose, Brianna Heath, Christine W. Nordahl, Sally Rogers, Adam J. Guastella, Paul Ashwood. Maternal immune conditions are increased in males with autism spectrum disorders and are associated with behavioural and emotional but not cognitive co-morbidity. Translational Psychiatry, 2020; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41398-020-00976-2
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
