Stress and brain development
Chronic stress during pregnancy has been a rather neglected topic, with some suggesting that there is no value in quantifying its effects on the fetus, newborn and beyond, because what is the point. The evidence is overwhelming for profound effects of stress during pregnancy on neurodevelopment. I and many others maintain that early identification of fetuses of mothers affected by chronic stress harbor the chance of early therapeutic intervention before or early after birth to help reduce long-term neurodevelopmental cost.
We and others have studied several avenues of such short and long term cost, ranging from programming of increased risk for autism spectrum disorder to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Early tackling of chronic stress' impact on brain development is well worth it, but it is a long game which poses its challenges in pursuing this line of research. We hope the research papers listed below contribute to the big picture and point to some solutions how to detect the effects of chronic stress early and how to tackle its sequelae when the butterfly effect is still small. This paper has been particularly inspirational to me from standpoint of connecting the notions of chronic stress and metabolic cost.
Shapiro GD, Fraser W, Frasch MG, Séguin JR. Psychosocial stress in pregnancy and preterm birth: associations and mechanisms. Journal of Perinatal Medicine. 2013 Nov;41(6):631-45. doi: 10.1515/jpm-2012-0295.
Vézina-Audette R, Frasch M, Burns P, Herry C, Chave E, Theoret C. Heart rate variability in relation to stress in the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). Canadian Veterinary Journal. 2016 Mar;57(3):289-92
Mary C. Wallingford, Ciara Benson, Nicholas W. Chavkin, Michael T. Chin, and Martin G. Frasch. Placental vascular calcification and cardiovascular health: How much of maternal and offspring health is written in stone? Frontiers in Physiology. 2018 Aug 7;9:1044. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.01044
Martin G. Frasch, Silvia Lobmaier, Tamara Stampalija, Paula Desplats, María Eugenia Pallarés, Verónica Pastor, Marcela Brocco, Jay Schulkin, Hau-tieng Wu, Christophe Herry, Andrew Seely, Gerlinde A.S. Metz, Yoram Louzoun, Marta Antonelli. Non-invasive biomarkers of fetal development reflecting brain epigenome: an integrative multi-scale multi-species perspective on data collection and analysis. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00257 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.05.026
Paula Desplats, Ashley Gutierrez, Marta C. Antonelli and Martin G. Frasch. Microglial memory of early life stress, epigenetic mechanisms and susceptibility to neurodegeneration in adulthood. https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00099. Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews. 2019. In press.
Lobmaier, SM, Wu, H-T, Shen, C, Su, P-C, Müller, A, Berg, G, Fabre, B, Weyrich, J, Zelgert, C, Frasch, MG, Antonelli, MC. Fetus: the radar of maternal stress. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09746 Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics 2019
Martin G. Frasch, Gal Snir, Marta C. Antonelli. Autism spectrum disorder: a neuro-immunometabolic hypothesis of the developmental origins. arXiv:1909.05198.
C. Wakefield, B. Janoschek, Y. Frank, F. Karp, J. Schulkin, M.G. Frasch. Chronic stress may disrupt covariant fluctuations of vitamin D and cortisol plasma levels in pregnant sheep during the last trimester: a preliminary report. arXiv:1904.06377
Marta C. Antonelli, Martin G. Frasch, Mercedes Rumi, Ritika Sharma, Peter Zimmerman, Maria Sol Molinet and Silvia M. Lobmaier. Early biomarkers and intervention programs for infants exposed to prenatal stress. Invited review contribution for Current Neuropharmacology – special issue “Neurobiology of stress” dedicated to the memory of Prof. Bruce McEwen. arXiv:2005.05787 [q-bio.QM] In press.
Pritam Sarkar, Silvia Lobmaier, Bibiana Fabre, Gabriela Berg, Alexander Mueller, Martin G. Frasch, Marta C. Antonelli, Ali Etemad. Detection of Maternal and Fetal Stress from Electrocardiogram with Self-Supervised Representation Learning. arXiv:2011.02000 [q-bio.QM].