Perinatal Programming of Neurodevelopment

Patrícia Pelufo Silveira MD PhD, Gisele Gus Manfro MD PhD, Patrícia Pelufo Silveira, Gisele Gus Manfro

Marta C. Antonelli

Large retrospective, epidemiological studies accumulated in the late 1980s, providing increasing evidence to the deeply rooted thought that perinatal events could persistently affect the individual's functioning and health/disease patterns throughout the lifetime. Evidences of such associations can be found in the literature since the beginning of the twentieth century, but studies from Barker, Hales, and colleagues serve as an important hallmark. They proposed the "thrifty phenotype" hypothesis, stating that poor nutrition in fetal and early infant life is detrimental to the development and function of the individuals' organism, predisposing them to the later development of adult chronic diseases. At first used to explain the increased risk for type 2 diabetes in low birth weight individuals, the hypothesis was soon adapted to other systems, becoming one of the core assumptions of the Developmental Origins of Adult Health and Disease (DOHaD) model. The central nervous system is also vulnerable to the effects of environmental variation during fetal or neonatal life. Many researchers have explored the effects of perinatal programming on the human neurodevelopment, and some aspects of the brain structure and/or functioning (such as cognitive function, physiological reactivity to stress, and the risk for behavioral disorders or psychopathology) were shown to be modifiable by the exposure to certain adverse events early in life such as neonatal infections, exposure to gestational psychosocial stress, nutrition during gestation, exposure to drugs, or tobacco smoking during pregnancy. Until recently, most studies focused on birth weight as a strong surrogate of the intrauterine environment, investigating the effects of low birth weight (as a marker of suboptimal fetal environment) on a variety of neurodevelopmental outcomes. Despite the fact that literature reviews on this topic are as old as 1940, the more recent retrospective studies are summarized in this chapter.