Newborns’ brains bear signs of adult illnesses
Disease-related genes associated with reduced volume in certain regions at birth
At birth, some infants are already saddled with brains that carry features of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Newborns who carry certain versions of genes already show brain shrinkage reminiscent of that in adults with brain illnesses, a study of 272 newborn babies reveals.
The new results, published online January 2 in Cerebral Cortex, illuminate what happens to the brain in the earliest stages of life, says neuroscientist Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in the study. “As we go through life, there are so many uncontrollable factors,” he says. “This is a way to see gene influences before the world steps in.”
Until this study, scientists didn’t have a good idea of whether certain brain signatures — such as reduced volume in parts of the brain — were present from birth or whether they accumulated over a lifetime, says study coauthor Rebecca Knickmeyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
To test this, Knickmeyer and her colleagues looked for the influence of 10 versions of seven genes on newborns’ brains. The researchers chose genes that affect how the brain grows and develops. These gene variants have also been linked to adult brain diseases, such as the ε4 version of the ApoE gene, which triples the risk of getting Alzheimer’s, and a version of the COMT gene, which has been implicated in schizophrenia.